Thomas Sowell. Random Thoughts

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The following is from The Thomas Sowell Reader, pp. 397- 403:

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Random Thoughts

One of the signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.

Let’s face it, most of us are not half as smart as we sometimes think we are — and for intellectuals, not one-tenth as smart.

There is no greater indictment of judges than the fact that honest people are afraid to go into court, while criminals swagger out its revolving doors.

Few skills are so well rewarded as the ability to convince parasites that they are victims.

Many of those in the so-called “helping professions” are helping people to be irresponsible and dependent on others.

The old adage about giving a man a fish versus teaching him how to fish has been updated by a reader: Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries! Moreover, some politician who wants his vote will declare all these things to be among his “basic rights.”

What has been called an educated person is often someone who has had a dangerously superficial exposure to a wide spectrum of subjects.

Government bailouts are like potato chips: you can’t stop with just one.

When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

“Funding” is one of the big phony words of our times — used by people too squeamish to say “money” but not too proud to take it, usually from the taxpayers.

It is important that young children be able to rely on their parents completely — and equally important that grown children not be able to.

Envy plus rhetoric equals “social justice.”

All beings are so fallible and flawed that to exempt any category of people from criticism is not a blessing but a curse. The intelligentsia have inflicted that curse on blacks.

There should be a special contempt for those who sit in safety and comfort, second-guessing at their leisure the split-second decisions that policemen had to make at the risk of their lives.

Historians of the future will have a hard time figuring out how so many organized groups of strident jackasses succeeded in leading us around by the nose and morally intimidating the majority into silence.

No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: “But what would you replace it with?” When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?

Those who want to take our money and gain power over us have discovered the magic formula: Get us envious or angry at others and we will surrender, in installments, not only our money, but our freedom. The most successful dictators of the 20^th century — Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao — all used this formula, and now class warfare politicians here are doing the same.

My favorite New Year’s resolution was to stop trying to reason with unreasonable people. This has reduced both my correspondence and my blood pressure.

No matter how much people on the left talk about compassion, they have no compassion for the taxpayers.

Judges should ask themselves: Are we turning the law into a trap for honest people and a bonanza for charlatans?

Why is there so much hand-wringing about how to keep track of violent sex offenders after they have been released from prison? If it is so dangerous to release them, then why are they being released, when laws can be rewritten to keep them behind bars?

Both the Sicilian mafia and the criminal tongs in China began as movements to defend the oppressed, so perhaps we should not be so painfully surprised that venerable American civil rights organizations have begun to degenerate into extortion rackets.

A reader writes: “I want to live in the country I grew up in. Where is it?”

Too often what are called “educated” people are simply people who have been sheltered from reality for years under ivy-covered buildings. Those whose whole careers have been spent in ivy-covered buildings, insulated by tenure, can remain adolescents on into their golden retirement years.

Some ideas sound so plausible that they can fail nine times in a row and still be believed the tenth time. Other ideas sound so implausible that they can succeed nine times in a row and still not be believed the tenth time. Government controls in the economy are among the first kinds of ideas and the operations of the free market are among the second kind.

It is amazing how many people seem to think that government exists to turn their prejudices into laws.

Among the sad signs of our times are the twisted metal “sculptures” put in front of public buildings at the taxpayers’ expense — obviously never intended to please the public, and in fact constituting a thumbing of the artist’s nose at the public.

Much of what are called “social problems” consists of the fact that intellectuals have theories that do not fit the real world. From this they conclude that it is the real world which is wrong and needs changing.

Thank heaven human beings are born with an ability to laugh at absurdity. Otherwise, we might go stark raving mad from all the absurd things we encounter in life.

Egalitarians create the most dangerous inequality of all — inequality of power. Allowing politicians to determine what other human beings will be allowed to earn is one of the most reckless gambles imaginable.

Trust is one of those things that is much easier to maintain than it is to repair.

It is self-destructive for any society to create a situation were a baby who is born into the world today automatically has pre-existing grievances against another baby born at the same time, because of what their ancestors did centuries ago. It is hard enough to solve our own problems, without trying to solve our ancestors’ problems.

Have you ever heard a single hard fact to back up all the sweeping claims for the benefits of “diversity”?

The people I feel sorry for are those who insist on continuing to do what they have always done but want the results to be different from what they have always been.

Alaska is much larger than France and Germany — combined. Yet its population is less than one-tenth that of New York City. Keep that in mind the next time you hear some environmentalist hysteria about the danger of “spoiling” Alaska by drilling for oil in an area smaller than Dulles Airport.

I am so old that I can remember when other people’s achievements were considered to be an inspiration, rather than a grievance.

A careful definition of words would destroy half of the agenda of the political left and scrutinizing evidence would destroy the other half.

How anyone can argue in favor of being non-judgmental is beyond me. To say that being non-judgmental is better than being judgmental is itself a judgment, and therefore a violation of principle.

How many other species’ members kill each other to the same extent as human beings?

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14 Dec 2023