Now this is a guy I could vote for. He should at least be appointed a cabinet position.
I really HATE reading stuff from Thomas Sowell.
He makes too damn much sense. It reminds me each time I read his words that the people best suited to making decisions aren’t the people who are elected.
Sowell makes perfect sense, as usual. His takedown of the left brings a question to mind.
What things are others duty-bound to impose, through government, on the rest of us?
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The 2 greatest dangers facing America in this new time of war are:
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1) IRAN with a Nuclear Weapon
2) The GULLIBILITY of the American People
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...THOMAS SEWELL, May 2007
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The starvation in the Ukraine wasn't the result of incompetence, except in the sense that it's incompetent to starve one's own citizens to death; it was a political fight and the Sovs didn't want the Ukranians to have the power that came with the production of that much food. Their famine was entirely intentional.
This guy is so good, it gives me goose bumps.
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.
I have always loved this man’s thinking.
Fred Thompson/John Bolton 2008
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.
I’m not sure I agree with Mr. Sowell’s use of the word ‘knowledge’ here as if it were a quantifiable thing, something one could measure in percentages.
For one thing, knowledge is not zero-sum. If I give you a quarter, I no longer have that money: that’s zero-sum. If I teach you what “labor omnia vincit” means, or how to make rice and beans, I don’t lose that knowledge myself.
Furthermore, if I were to explain to you in detail how the World Trade Center collapsed by itself, or some other falsehood, that would increase the volume of ‘what is known’, but not ‘what is true’.
He’s using an economic metaphor, and I admit my ignorance of the field, so the fault could be on me.
But here goes: if currency has value because it’s ‘backed up’ by something whose value can be agreed upon. What ‘backs up’ knowledge?
Having said that, I SO enjoy reading Thomas Sowell; his writing is always a banquet of great ideas, succinctly stated. He enriches us all.