Controversial Essays Quotes

“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.”
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays

“Most officially “poor” Americans today have things that middle-class Americans of an earlier time could only dream about—including color TV, videocassette recorders, microwave ovens, and their own cars. Moreover, half of all poor households have air-conditioning.
Leftist redistribution of income could never accomplish that, because there are simply not enough rich people for their wealth to have such a dramatic effect on the living standards of the poor, even if it was all confiscated and redistributed. Moreover, many attempts at redistributing wealth in various countries around the world have ended up redistributing poverty.
After all, rich people can see the political handwriting on the wall, and can often take their money and leave the country, long before a government program can get started to confiscate it. They are also likely to take with them skills and entrepreneurial experience that are even harder to replace than the money.”
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays

“The question is not what anybody deserves. The question is who is to take on the God-like role of deciding what everybody else deserves. You can talk about “social justice” all you want. But what death taxes boil down to is letting politicians take money from widows and orphans to pay for goodies that they will hand out to others, in order to buy votes to get reelected. That is not social justice or any other kind of justice.”
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays

“Talk about how various people have been “winners” in “the lottery of life” or have things that others don’t have just because they “happen to have money” is part of the delegitimizing of property as a prelude to seizing it.
Luck certainly plays a very large role in all our lives. But we need to be very clear about what that role is. Very few people just “happen” to have money. Typically, they have it because their fellow human beings have voluntarily paid them for providing some goods or services, which are valued more than the money that is paid for them. It is not a zero-sum game. Both sides are better off because of it—and the whole society is better off when such transactions take place freely among free and independent people.
Who can better decide the value of the goods and services that someone has produced than the people who actually use those goods and services—and pay for them with their own hard-earned money?
Luck may well have played a role in enabling some people to provide valuable goods and services. Others might have been able to do the same if they had been raised by better parents, taught in better schools or chanced upon someone who pointed them in the right direction. But you are not going to change that by confiscating the fruits of productivity. All you are likely to do is reduce that productivity and undermine the virtues and attitudes that create prosperity and make a free society possible.”
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays

“Electric cars may be fun at amusement parks, where they don’t have to go very far or very fast. But if the consuming public wanted electric cars for regular use, Detroit would be manufacturing them by the millions. Only people infatuated with their own wonderful specialness would think that their job is to coerce both the manufacturers and the consuming public into something that neither of them wants.”
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays

“According to House minority leader Richard Gephardt: “What we have is two important values in direct conflict: freedom of speech and our desire for healthy campaigns in a healthy democracy.”
― Thomas Sowell, Controversial Essays