Posted on 05/15/2007 9:10:23 PM PDT by jazusamo
“What things are others duty-bound to impose, through government, on the rest of us?”
That’s almost a quote, and I believe Sowell wrote it.
“Question for my Socialist friends:
Why are others bound to do for you that which you will not do for yourselves?”
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THOMAS SEWELL shared the 2 greatest dangers America faces in this new time of war with us last week on Conservative Talk Radio.
The GULLIBILITY of the American People has them once again being led by the nose by the very same people who long ago gave us:
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Pictures of a vietnamese Re-Education (SLAVE LABOR) Camp
http://www.Freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1308949/posts
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..”JOURNEY from the FALL”.. MoviePremieres = Fall of Saigon CLARITY..
http://www.Freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1806248/posts
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Indeed, our GULLIBILITY could well be the End of us.
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Sowell likely knows that he is not well suited for electoral decision making. He has thus specialized in ideas on political economy where he has a comparative advantage and has had much more influence than he would have if he had tried to branch out into electoral politics where his influence would be diluted by having to make practical political compromises.
Sowell is a great writer, but does anyone else wonder why his paragraphs are so short? I get the impression he is trying to spoon-feed the ignorant, at least in his op-ed pieces. Unfortunately, as always, the ignorant who need most to read his articles won’t ever see them, and he is preaching to the choir here at FR.
bttt
Excessive power in the hands of one or a few individuals will always be a problem. Just look at your own workplace. How many petty tyrants does the average person run across in a lifetime of work? Quite a few in my experience. I could easily picture the damage a few of my past and present co-workers and supervisors could do if given much more power than what they held or currently hold. If you know any persons who refuse to admit to ever making mistakes, you just might have a future Stalin or Mao if given that much power.
read “Vision of the Anointed”. That is one of his best.
I have always loved this man’s thinking.
Fred Thompson/John Bolton 2008
“LOL! A lot of his statements he comes up with I already knew but I had no idea how to really express it and he does it so easily.”
SO easily! Look at his essays-AMAZING! He uses just the words needed-no more no less. Just try to add or remove a single word from his writings-it can’t be done...
No one has even one percent of all the knowledge in a society, because knowledge is not all articulated rationally (as Sowell would say, and has).When my daughter was little she had an operation in a NY city hospital, and I found myself travelling daily on an otherwise unfamiliar route to visit her. After I had done so for a few times, I noticed myself driving in the left lane when it would have seemed more appropriate to stay in the right lane. So I swung over into the right lane - and was rewarded with a rough patch in the highway which was unpleasant to subject my undercarriage of my car to. Apparently I had subconsciously learned that, but didn't consciously know it until I consciously overrode my subconscious "knowledge" and consciously found out why I was doing what I was doing.
Any time you make a mistake, you have to ruefully realize that the chances are excellent that somebody somewhere was already so familiar with that particular trap that they wouldn't be caught dead falling into it. Look at the tables of stock prices: those represent the best current estimate of the values of those stocks, but time will show that nearly all of them are wildly inaccurate. All you have to do is know one stock which is wildly undervalued, and buy it on margin - or know one stock which is wildly overvalued, and sell it short. But do you do know one? If you do, you have bet the farm on it. If you haven't done so, then you don't know, do you? (That point came from Knowledge and Decisions by Thomas Sowell "Ideas are everywhere, but knowledge is rare...").
It's shocking to me that any FReeper can read Thomas Sowell's columns and confess to having only read a paltry three of his books. The man has written dozens of books - and most of them are gems.
The elitism of liberalism is its most illiberal feature. It is intensified by their tendency to glom together in certain places, so that they are certain never to hear contrary opinions, ignorance reinforcing ignorance.
Very good read, and how very true. Amen.
This seems to be almost universal in opinion columns. I think it's a factor of the distribution over the internet, rather than every writer's using one-sentence paragraphs.
Good Lord. I hope that is not an indictment of ME reading a “Paltry” three of his books...I would presume having done that, I am in the upper five percent of nearly any demographic slice you would make!!!
“Why are others bound to do for you that which you will not do for yourselves?””
That’s close. But what I’m wondering is what do others have a duty to IMPOSE on us, rather than do for us?
I think it has to do with writing for newspapers, which have very narrow columns. People are used to seeing 5-10 line paragraphs, which is what these are if you narrow the article to newpaper column width.
Oh, good point! I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll have to look at my newspapers to see if they’re doing just that.
Indictment? Of course not - more of an incitement to get you to take a trip to the library and see what else Sowell has written besides the three titles you mentioned. Those three are among his best, but there are numerous others which can be compared with them and some might even be better. When I first tumbled to how insightful Thomas Sowell was, I went to the library and got as many of his books as I could - and back then he hadn't written half as many as he now has to his credit.
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