Thomas Sowell, Cost-Benefit Analysis, and the Limits of Regulation

Thomas Sowell is a great economist, but his expertise extends to other fields of study. Everything from history to education. But he’s also famous for being a great communicator, with dozens of well-known quotes. I use one of them on my rotating banner because it succinctly summarizes why the left has to rely on emotional […]

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Venezuela and Santa Claus vs Thomas Sowell and the Little Red Hen

Earlier this year, I borrowed from Dante’s Inferno and created the Five Circles of Statist Hell. At the time, I suggested that Venezuela was on the cusp of moving from the third circle (“widespread poverty and economic misery”) to the fourth circle (“systematic and grinding poverty and deprivation”). Since we now know that children in […]

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Thomas Sowell on the Economics of Redistribution: Quicksand at One End and Beatings at the other End

Over the years, I’ve shared some clever images, jokes, and cartoons to expose the flawed mindset of those who hope to achieve coerced equality of outcomes with redistribution and high tax rates. The size of a pizza vs the share of a slice. The modern version of the Little Red Hen. Washington’s Byzantine welfare state. […]

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In the Debate over Capitalism and the Poor, the Score Is: Thomas Sowell 1 – Pope Francis 0

Two days ago, I contrasted the views of Pope Francis and Walter Williams about capitalism and morality. I explained that Walter had the upper hand because free markets are a positive-sum game based on voluntary exchange while redistribution (at best) is a zero-sum game based on coercion. That’s the theoretical argument. Now let’s look at […]

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Thomas Sowell Explains How the Welfare State Hurts the Poor

Political cartoonists like Michael Ramirez and Chuck Asay are effective because they convey so much with images. But we need more than clever cartoons if we’re going to educate the general population about how government harms the economy and undermines freedom. And that’s why Thomas Sowell is so invaluable. He’s one of the nation’s top […]

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Thomas Sowell Exposes Dishonest Budgetary Scare Tactics and Cartoonists Mock Obama’s Hysteria

Public finance experts are quite familiar with the budgetary shenanigans of cossetted government bureaucracies. They even have terms to describe how agencies and departments try to manipulate outcomes by claiming that any requirement for fiscal restraint will necessitate cuts to the most politically popular parts of the budget. The “fireman first principle” – Describes how […]

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After Reviewing the Federal Reserve’s Lousy Track Record, Thomas Sowell Asks Why such a Deeply Flawed Institution Should Be Allowed to Accumulate more Power

When speaking about the difference between the private sector and the government, I sometimes emphasize that mistakes and errors are inevitable, and that the propensity to screw up may be just as prevalent in the private sector as it is in the public sector. I actually think the government is more likely to screw up, for reasons […]

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An Invaluable Economic History Lesson from Thomas Sowell: Politicians Should Only “Do Something” If that Means Doing Less

The great Ronald Reagan famously said (and I am paraphrasing, since I do not remember the exact phrase) that the most dangerous words in the English language were “I am from Washington and I am here to help you.” Those are very wise words, especially when we think of the damage politicians have done because of […]

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Thomas Sowell Exposes How the Left Advances Statism by Distorting Language

Even though it’s important – particularly in a world with slippery politicians – to define words and terms accurately, I haven’t focused on this issue. Indeed, a quick search through my archives shows that the only glossary I’ve ever published was this humorous list of financial terms. And the only dictionary I’ve ever published was […]

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Obama’s Technically not a Socialist, but He Won’t Like How Thomas Sowell Describes His Philosophy

A couple of years ago, Newt Gingrich accused Obama of being a socialist, causing some squawking and grousing about incivility from the more sensitive types in Washington. I jumped to the President’s defense, pointing out that Obama is a different type of statist. I’m gratified that Thomas Sowell of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution agrees with […]

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Thomas Sowell Explains the 1942 Case that Enabled Government Statism, Just as Plessy v. Ferguson Enabled Government Racism

A few days ago, I wrote about Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution, which lists the “enumerated powers” of the federal government. That post included a reference to Wickard v. Filburn, an infamous Supreme Court case that opened the door to unlimited intervention from Washington. Why was this case important? As is so often the […]

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Thomas Sowell Wonders Why the Obama Administration Is Trying to Undermine Educational Opportunities for Black Children

Welcome, Instapundit readers. This school choice video shows the best way of dealing with the problems described in this post (though, as Walter Williams explains, that’s only part of the answer). ======================================================= If you care about helping the less fortunate succeed, I’m commenting today on a Thomas Sowell column that will make you sad and […]

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Thomas Sowell Exposes the Historical and Economic Illiteracy of the Political Class

Thomas Sowell just completed a three-part “Back to the Future” series, looking at a couple of fiscal policy issues. His unifying theme is how the political class fails (perhaps deliberately) to learn from mistakes. In Part I, he decimates President Obama’s new stimulus scheme. Once we get past the glowing rhetoric, what is the president […]

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Thomas Sowell: Obama’s Policies Are a Sedative, not a Stimulus

As usual, Sowell is right on the mark. By expanding the size and burden of government, Obama is making it more difficult for the economy to prosper: President Obama keeps telling us that he is “creating jobs.” But more and more Americans have no jobs. The unemployment rate has declined slightly, but only because many […]

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Insight from Thomas Sowell

Government did not help us in the 1930s, and it is not helping us today.

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Libertarian Humor

Time for some more humor about America’s most lovable minority. We’ll start with a guy who must have raided his friend’s “jewelry box.” Next, libertarians were in favor of Juneteenth, and not just because slavery was an awful policy of government. For our third item, the Babylon Bee has an amusing story about nine warning […]

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The 2nd Amendment and the Individual Right to Gun Ownership

Back in 2012, I shared a video clip of Ice-T defending the 2nd Amendment, but that video is now dead, so I’m glad to see that Prager University has added his comments as a prologue to this defense of gun rights by Prof. Eugene Volokh. Ice-T and Prof. Volokh make for a good combination, one […]

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Blame Washington for the Great Depression

There are several false narratives about economic history, involving topics ranging from the recent financial crisis to 19th-century sweatshops. But probably the biggest falsehood, as explained in this video by Prof. Lee Ohanian, is the notion that big government saved us from the Great Depression. The only shortcoming of Ohanian’s video is that he’s analyzing […]

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Walter Williams, RIP

One of America’s leading public intellectuals, Walter Williams, has passed away. In 2014, I shared a teaser for Suffer No Fools, a video biography of his life. To commemorate the life of this great man, here’s the full video. I first got to know Walter when I was a Ph.D. student at George Mason University […]

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Correcting Pope Francis…Again

While I generally don’t think recycling is economically sensible, I am going to reuse this 2013 BBC interview because it’s time (again) to criticize the economic illiteracy of Pope Francis. As I’ve previously explained, it’s good to care for the less fortunate. Indeed, as I explain in the interview, it’s part of being a good […]

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The Trump Administration Tramples Property Rights

During the Obama years, I frequently criticized the Administration’s bad policy choices. On a wide range of issues. But I also expressed disappointment when President Obama arbitrarily and unilaterally decided to override or overlook laws that were inconvenient to his agenda. Or when he asserted powers that didn’t exist. Simply stated, I care about the […]

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Anti-Keynesian Growth after World War II

Last week, I shared some data showing how the economy enjoyed a strong recovery from recession in the early 1920s when President Warren Harding cut government spending. (And these were genuine cuts, not the nonsense we get from today’s politicians, who claim they’ve cut spending simply because the budget increases by 5 percent rather than […]

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Warren Harding’s Anti-Keynesian Solution to a Deep Economic Downturn

We did not get good policy during the economic crisis of the 1930s. Indeed, it’s quite likely that bad decisions by Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt deepened and lengthened the Great Depression. Likewise, George Bush and Barack Obama had the wrong responses (the TARP bailout and the faux stimulus) to the economic downturn of 2008-09. […]

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Ludicrous Poverty Analysis from the United Nations

Back in 2017, the Center for Freedom and Prosperity released this video, which shows that free markets and small government are the best recipe for poor nations that want to become rich nations. The CF&P video was motivated in part by a need to debunk international bureaucracies such as the OECD and IMF, which abandoned […]

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Teacher Unions vs. Black Children

Today is Thomas Sowell’s 90th birthday. The man is a living legend. I’ve cited his great work many times, and I definitely urge people to read what Walter Williams just wrote about his long-time friend. And I also recommend this Mark Perry column, which contains 15 of Sowell’s most insightful quotes, as well as two […]

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Economic Liberty and the Constitution

In this interview from last March, I groused that the Supreme Court – largely thanks to statist Justices appointed by one of America’s worst presidents – basically decided, starting in the 1930s, that it would no longer be bound by the Constitution’s provisions that protect economic liberty. I’m not a lawyer, much less an expert […]

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Coronavirus and the Two Americas

Earlier this month, Neil Ferguson was awarded membership in the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame after he and his mistress were caught violating lockdown rules that Ferguson – in his role as a supposed public health expert – demanded for the entire United Kingdom. This was a stunning display of hypocrisy, perhaps even to the extent […]

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The Media’s Pervasively Dishonest Coverage of Trump’s New Budget

I would prefer not to write about President Trump’s new budget, largely because I know it’s not a serious proposal. Even before he was elected, I pointed out that Trump was a big-government Republican who had no intention of dealing with serious fiscal issues such as the rising burden of entitlement spending. So I wasn’t […]

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More Economic Illiteracy from Pope Francis

Back in 2013, I talked to the BBC about Pope Francis and his bizarre hostility to free enterprise. Sadly, it doesn’t appear that the Pope took my advice (though I think it’s amusing that at least someone in the Vatican is paying attention). There’s a wealth of evidence that markets are the best way of […]

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Nazis and Socialism

Politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez say that their goal of “democratic socialism” is very different from the socialism of Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela, as well as the socialism of the former Soviet Union. And they doubtlessly would get very upset if anyone equated their ideology with the “national socialism” of Hitler’s […]

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