The Words of Thomas Sowell

Envy plus rhetoric equals 'social justice'.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011)

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Liberals try to show their concern for the poor by raising the level of minimum wage laws. Yet they show no interest in hard evidence that minimum wage laws create disastrous levels of unemployment among young blacks in this country.

— Liberalism Versus Blacks (2013)

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Equality of rights does not mean equality of results. I can have all the equal treatment in the world on a golf course and I will not finish within shouting distance of Tiger Woods.

— Affirmative Action and Gay Marriage (2008)

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Most people on the right have no problem understanding people on the left because many, if not most, were on the left themselves when they were younger. But many, if not most, people on the left find it inexplicable how any decent and intelligent person could be on the right.

— Random Thoughts (2001)

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Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.

— The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (1995)

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The fundamental difference between decision-makers in the market and decision-makers in government is that the former are subject to continuous and consequential feedback which can force them to adjust to what others prefer and are willing to pay for, while those who make decisions in the political arena face no such inescapable feedback to force them to adjust to the reality of other people’s desires and preferences.

— Intellectuals and Society (2009)

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You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth — and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated.

— The Fallacy of Redistribution (2012)

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It is amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.

— Is Reality Optional (1993)

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No government of the left has done as much for the poor as capitalism has. Even when it comes to the redistribution of income, the left talks the talk but the free market walks the walk. What do the poor most need? They need to stop being poor. And how can that be done, on a mass scale, except by an economy that creates vastly more wealth? Yet the political left has long had a remarkable lack of interest in how wealth is created. As far as they are concerned, wealth exists somehow and the only interesting question is how to redistribute it.

— Controversial Essays (2002)

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Knowledge can be enormously costly, and is often scattered in widely uneven fragments, too small to be individually usable in decision making. The communication and coordination of these scattered fragments of knowledge is one of the basic problems- perhaps the basic problem- of any society.

— Knowledge and Decisions (1980)

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The dogma that no culture is superior to any other is contradicted by facts at every turn. Virtually every culture is superior to some other cultures at something. How many cultures can brew beer like the Germans, create wine like the French or make Sake like the Japanese?

— Controversial Essays (2002)

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If it were possible to enforce a ban on lying, a ghastly silence would fall over the city of Washington.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011)

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When only two percent of immigrants from Japan to the United States go on welfare, while 46 percent of the immigrants from Laos do, there is no single pattern that applies to all immigrants. Everything depends on which immigrants you are talking about and which periods of history.

— Basic Economics (2000)

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Facts are seldom allowed to contaminate the beautiful vision of the left. What matters to the true believers are the ringing slogans, endlessly repeated. Darwinian adaptation to environment applies not only to nature but also to society. Just as you don’t find eagles living in the ocean or fish living on mountain tops, so you don’t find leftists concentrated where their ideas have to stand the test of performance.

— The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011)

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Among the many other questions raised by the nebulous concept of “greed” is why it is a term applied almost exclusively to those who want to earn more money or to keep what they have already earned—never to those wanting to take other people’s money in taxes or to those wishing to live on the largesse dispensed from such taxation. No amount of taxation is ever described as “greed” on the part of government or the clientele of government.

— The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (1995)

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There was a time when we honored those who created the prosperity and the freedom that we enjoy. Today we honor the complainers and sue the creators. Perhaps that is inevitable in an era when we no longer count our blessings, but instead count all our unfulfilled wishes.

— Controversial Essays (2002)

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Abraham Lincoln once asked an audience how many legs a dog has if you count the tail as a leg. When they answered "five," Lincoln told them that the answer was four. The fact that you called the tail a leg did not make it a leg.

— Dismantling America: And Other Controversial Essays (2010)

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The politically correct party line on minimum wages is that people cannot afford to raise their families on low pay, so the government has to force employers to provide "a living wage" for families. But the vast majority of people making minimum wages are youngsters just beginning their careers.

— Controversial Essays (2002)

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You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth — and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated. Farmers in the Soviet Union cut back on how much time and effort they invested in growing their crops, when they realized that the government was going to take a big part of the harvest. They slaughtered and ate young animals that they would normally keep tending and feeding until maturity.

— The Fallacy of Redistribution (2012)

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Intellectuals give people who have the handicap of poverty the further handicap of a sense of victimhood.

— Intellectuals and Society (2009)

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