Thomas Sowell. . . . .Genius, …..Retires. . . . . All The Best Mr. Sowell. Trump Would Be Proud Of This Quintessential American.

Here are some of Sowell’s pithy thoughts:
*If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.
*The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state.
*Helping those who have been struck by unforeseeable misfortunes is fundamentally different from making dependency a way of life.
*The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.
*The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.
*I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.
*When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
*People who pride themselves on their ‘complexity’ and deride others for being ‘simplistic’ should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.
*Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.
*The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
*Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on ‘income distribution,’ the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.
*Since this is an era when many people are concerned about ‘fairness’ and ‘social justice,’ what is your ‘fair share’ of what someone else has worked for?”
*Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.
*Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.
*Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options.
*Many on the political left are so entranced by the beauty of their vision that they cannot see the ugly reality they are creating in the real world.
*Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.
*Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.
*It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication, and a government bureaucracy to administer it.
*Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
*The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
*I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.
*Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.
*In both England and the United States, those people most zealous for tighter gun-control laws tend also to be most lenient toward criminals and most restrictive on police. The net result is that law-abiding citizens become more vulnerable when they are disarmed and criminals disobey gun-control laws, as they disobey other laws.
*Any ‘temporary policy’ whose duration is defined by the goal of achieving something that has never been achieved before, anywhere in the world, could more fittingly be characterized as eternal.
*The one bright spot in black ghettos around the country are the schools that parents are free to choose for their own children. Some are Catholic schools, some are secular private schools, and some are charter schools financed by public school systems but operating without the suffocating rules that apply to other public schools.
*If we have learned nothing else after decades of socially divisive and educationally futile racial busing, it should be obvious that seating black kids next to white kids is neither necessary nor sufficient to get them a better education.

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