Posted on 07/01/2015 12:35:24 PM PDT by jazusamo
Steve Hayward pointed out recently that economist Thomas Sowell shares the same birthday as Frederic Bastiat – they were both born on June 30. To recognize Bastiat’s birthday I shared some of his quotes on CD earlier this week, and I’ll now do the same today for Thomas Sowell, who turned 85 yesterday. Here is Thomas Sowell’s webpage and here is his Wikipedia entry. Milton Friedman once said, “The word ‘genius’ is thrown around so much that it’s becoming meaningless, but nevertheless I think Tom Sowell is close to being one.” And because Thomas Sowell is such a prolific writer and covers so many economic topics, I’ll focus here on ten of my favorite Sowell quotes (and a video) on the topic of Obamacare:
1. From a 2013 Thomas Sowell’s column “ An Old ‘New’ Program“:
Like so many things that seem new, ObamaCare is in many ways old wine in new bottles. What is older than the idea that some exalted elite know what is good for us better than we know ourselves? Obama uses the rhetoric of going “forward,” but he is in fact going backward to an age when despots told everybody what they had better do and better not do.
Yet another way in which ObamaCare is an old political story is that it began as supposedly a way to deal with the problem of a segment of the population — those without health insurance. But, instead of directly helping those particular people to get insurance, the “solution” was to expand the government’s power over everybody, including people who already had health insurance that they wanted to keep.
Since there has never been a society of human beings without at least some segment with some problem, this is a formula for a never-ending expansion of government power.
2. In this 2013 column, Thomas Sowell discusses “busybody politics”:
Whether in housing, education or innumerable other aspects of life, the key to busybody politics, and its endlessly imposed “solutions,” is that third parties pay no price for being wrong. This not only presents opportunities for the busybodies to engage in moral preening, but also to flatter themselves that they know better what is good for other people than these other people know for themselves.
ObamaCare is perhaps the ultimate in busybody politics. People who have never even run a drugstore, much less a hospital, blithely prescribe what must be done by the entire medical system, from doctors to hospitals to producers of pharmaceutical drugs to health insurance companies.
3. Thomas Sowell wrote this in 2009 when Obamacare was being rushed through Congress before the August recess:
As for those uninsured Americans who are supposedly the reason for all this sound and fury [Obamacare], there is remarkably little interest in why they are uninsured, despite the incessant repetition of the fact that they are. The endless repetition serves a political purpose but digging into the underlying facts might undermine that purpose. Many find it sufficient to say that the uninsured cannot “afford” medical insurance. But what you can afford depends not only on how much money you have but also on what your priorities are.
Many people who are uninsured have incomes from which medical insurance premiums could readily be paid without any undue strain (see chart above). Many young people, especially, don’t buy medical insurance and elderly people already have Medicare. The poor have Medicaid available, even though many do not bother to sign up for it, until they are already in the hospital– which they can do then.
Throwing numbers around about how many people are uninsured may create the impression that the uninsured cannot get medical treatment, when it fact they can get medical treatment at any hospital emergency room.
4. From one of Sowell’s Random Thoughts columns in February 2014:
With his decision declaring ObamaCare constitutional, Chief Justice John Roberts turned what F.A. Hayek called “The Road to Serfdom” into a super highway. The government all but owns us now, and can order us to do pretty much whatever it wants us to do.
5. From Sowell’s column in 2009 “ The ‘Costs’ of Medical Care: Part III“:
If we cannot afford the quantity and quality of medical care that we want now, the government has no miraculous way of enabling us to afford it in the future.
If you think the government can lower medical costs by eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse,” as some Washington politicians claim, the logical question is: Why haven’t they done that already?
Over the years, scandal after scandal has shown waste, fraud and abuse to be rampant in Medicare and Medicaid. Why would anyone imagine that a new government medical program will do what existing government medical programs have clearly failed to do?
If we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical drugs now, how can we afford to pay for doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical drugs, in addition to a new federal bureaucracy to administer a government-run medical system?
6. From The Art of the Impossible in 2013:
Do you seriously believe that millions more people can be given medical care and vast new bureaucracies created to administer payment for it, with no additional costs?
Just as there is no free lunch, there is no free red tape. Bureaucrats have to eat, just like everyone else, and they need a place to live and some other amenities. How do you suppose the price of medical care can go down when the costs of new government bureaucracies are added to the costs of the medical treatment itself?
And where are the extra doctors going to come from, to treat the millions of additional patients? Training more people to become doctors is not free. Politicians may ignore costs but ignoring those costs will not make them go away. With bureaucratically controlled medical care, you are going to need more doctors, just to treat a given number of patients, because time that is spent filling out government forms is time that is not spent treating patients. And doctors have the same 24 hours in the day as everybody else.
When you add more patients to more paperwork per patient, you are talking about still more costs. How can that lower medical costs? But although that may be impossible, politics is the art of the impossible. All it takes is rhetoric and a public that does not think beyond the rhetoric they hear.
7. From Thomas Sowell’s book “ Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy ” (p. 570-571):
Often related to the notion of reasonable or affordable prices is the idea of keeping “costs” down by various government devices. But prices are not costs. Prices are what pay for costs. Where the costs are not covered by the prices that are legally allowed to be charged, the supply of the goods or services simply tends to decline in quantity or quality, whether those goods are apartments, medicines, or other things.
The cost of medical care is not reduced in the slightest when the government imposes lower rates of pay for doctors or hospitals. There are still just as many resources required as before to build and equip a hospital or to train a medical student to become a doctor. Countries which impose lower prices on medical treatment have ended up with longer waiting lists to see doctors, less modern equipment in their hospitals and, in the case of Britain, a substantial proportion of their doctors have come from Third World countries with lower quality medical training, because of an inadequate supply of British doctors willing to practice medicine in Britain. Costs have not been lowered for the same medical care. Lower prices have been paid for lower quality treatment.
MP: Something to keep in mind the next time you hear the frequently repeated nonsense that Obamacare “will bend the health care cost curve down.”
8. From one of Sowell’s column in 2014 :
The front page of a local newspaper in northern California featured the headline “The Promise Denied,” lamenting the under-representation of women in computer engineering. The continuation of this long article on an inside page had the headline, “Who is to blame for this?”
In other words, the fact that reality does not match the preconceptions of the intelligentsia shows that there is something wrong with reality, for which somebody must be blamed. Apparently their preconceptions cannot be wrong.
Women, like so many other groups, seem not to be dedicated to fulfilling the prevailing fetish among the intelligentsia that every demographic group should be equally represented in all sorts of places. Women have their own agendas, and if these agendas do not usually include computer engineering, what is to be done? Draft women into engineering schools to satisfy the preconceptions of our self-anointed saviors? Or will a propaganda campaign be sufficient to satisfy those who think that they should be making other people’s choices for them?
That kind of thinking is how we got ObamaCare.
9. From Sowell’s column “ Listening to a Liar: Part II” in 2009:
Even those who can believe that Obama can conjure up the money [to insure millions more people] through eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse” should ask themselves where he is going to conjure up the additional doctors, nurses, and hospitals needed to take care of millions more patients.
If he can’t pull off that miracle, then government-run medical care in the United States can be expected to produce what government-run medical care in Canada, Britain, and other countries has produced– delays of weeks or months to get many treatments, not to mention arbitrary rationing decisions by bureaucrats.
Con men understand that their job is not to use facts to convince skeptics but to use words to help the gullible to believe what they want to believe. No message has been more welcomed by the gullible, in countries around the world, than the promise of something for nothing. That is the core of Barack Obama’s medical care plan.
10. In the video below from 2009, Thomas Sowell discusses Obama’s proposed (at that time) health care reform:
Thomas Sowell - Obama's Health Care Reform
Happy birthday to a truly fine man!
Happy birthday, Mr. Sowell! God bless!
OMG, I remember when Sowell was a young radical with an Afro.
Happy Birthday Mr. Sowell. Hope you are around for a long time to come! We need smarties in this world.
Bump.
Amen...Happy birthday Dr. Sowell!
Heard him interviewed about 2 years ago...was stunned to learn he was 83 at the time. He is a treasure.
Three great ones in explaining free market economics, and making it simple in my mind:
Milton Friedman
Then Thomas Sowell
And when he goes to that great market in the sky, next in line is John Stossel.
They’re not identical, but they all have (had) the gift of making the complex so so simple to understand. (Walter Williams no slouch either...)
Bump.
Still has a mind like a well-oiled machine. I hope he lasts past the apocalypse.
Happy Birthday Mr. Sowell. Hope you are around for a long time to come! We need smarties in this world.
Gosh at 85 every day is a miracle that he lives past it. Unbelievable. I can’t believe he is so old. Doesn’t look it. Hopefully he is with us a bit longer. It is weird that all the conservatives are 60 and above (at least the ones talking on radio and print). We need some fresh blood or we will be in trouble in 10 years when the rest die off.
Amen to the above... and Happy Birthday to a true genius... and a good man.
Happy Birthday Dr Sowell and many more
Thomas Sowell has committed the unpardonable sin of escaping the Democrat-Socialist Plantation. I’m glad that a man with such intellectual firepower is on our side.
Wow...we are getting old cause I had no idea he was 85 !
Bravo! I probably first heard from him reading Forbes magazine 25 years ago and he had a monthly column. Cheers.
I hope to say soon that I have read every book of his currently available. Started about 12 years ago and I am getting close.
He is a national treasure.
I think economics is basically simple but it takes the genius and honesty of someone like Dr. Sowell to make it seem simple. On the other side are a lot of people who profit by making it seem impossible to understand. Some of them ascend to high office and become very wealthy by promising something for nothing.
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