Philosophers From The United States

"If there is one thing that is bipartisan in Washington, it is brazen hypocrisy."

"What was special about America was not that it had slavery, which existed all over the world, but that Americans were among the very few peoples who began to question the morality of holding human beings in bondage. That was not yet a majority view among Americans in the 18th century, but it was not even a serious minority view."

"In a country with more than 300 million people, it is remarkable how obsessed the media have become with just one—Donald Trump. What is even more remarkable is that, after seven years of repeated disasters, both domestically and internationally, under a glib egomaniac in the White House, so many potential voters are turning to another glib egomaniac to be his successor."

"If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win."

"What socialism, fascism and other ideologies of the left have in common is an assumption that some very wise people—like themselves—need to take decisions out of the hands of lesser people, like the rest of us, and impose those decisions by government fiat."

"Both history and contemporary data show that countries prosper more when there are stable and dependable rules, under which people can make investments without having to fear unpredictable new government interventions before these investments can pay off."

"The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy."

"Peter Robinson: Our intellectual-in-chief, Barack Obama, got his BA from Columbia, his JD from Harvard, he taught for a number of years at the University of Chicago Law School. May I suppose that Tom Sowell is duly impressed? Thomas Sowell: [laughing] Oh, yeah! You might say the road to hell is paved with Ivy League degrees!"

"Failure is a big part of a free market's success. People fail to live up to their potential, or to carry out all their good intentions, in all kinds of economic and political systems. Capitalism makes them pay a price for their failures, while socialism, feudalism, fascism and other systems enable personal failures, especially by those at the top, to be ignored and the inevitable price to be paid by others in lower standards of living than they could have had with the existing resources and technology. p. 24"

"It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer "universal health care.""

"It may be expecting too much to expect most intellectuals to have common sense, when their whole life is based on their being uncommon -- that is, saying things that are different from what everyone else is saying. There is only so much genuine originality in anyone. After that, being uncommon means indulging in pointless eccentricities or clever attempts to mock or shock."

"In its pursuit of justice for a segment of society, in disregard of the consequences for society as a whole, what is called 'social justice' might more accurately be called anti-social justice, since what consistently gets ignored or dismissed are precisely the costs to society. Such a conception of justice seeks to correct, not only biased or discriminatory acts by individuals or by social institutions, but unmerited disadvantages in general, from whatever source they may arise."

"In the summer of 1959, as in the summer of 1957, I worked as a clerk-typist in the headquarters of the U.S. Public Health Service in Washington. The people I worked for were very nice and I grew to like them. One day, a man had a heart attack at around 5 PM, on the sidewalk outside the Public Health Service. He was taken inside to the nurse's room, where he was asked if he was a government employee. If he were, he would have been eligible to be taken to a medical facility there. Unfortunately, he was not, so a phone call was made to a local hospital to send an ambulance. By the time this ambulance made its way through miles of Washington rush-hour traffic, the man was dead. He died waiting for a doctor, in a building full of doctors. Nothing so dramatized for me the nature of a bureaucracy and its emphasis on procedures, rather than results."

"The average black student at MIT is in the bottom 10% of MIT students in math. But he is in the top 90% of all American students in math. Something like one fourth of all the black students going to MIT do not graduate. You're talking about a pool of people whom you are artificially turning into failures by mismatching them with the school."

"Racism has never done this country any good, and it needs to be fought against, not put under new management for different groups."

"“Anyone who has actually had to take responsibility for consequences by running any kind of enterprise — whether economic or academic, or even just managing a sports team — is likely at some point to be chastened by either the setbacks brought on by his own mistakes or by seeing his successes followed by negative consequences that he never anticipated.”"

"To find anything comparable to crowds' euphoric reactions to Obama, you would have to go back to old newsreels of German crowds in the 1930s, with their adulation of their fuehrer, Adolf Hitler. With hindsight, we can look back on those people with pity, knowing now how many of them would be led to their deaths by the man they idolized."

"When we hear about rent control or gun control, we may think about rent or guns but the word that really matters is 'control.' That is what the political left is all about, as you can see by the incessant creation of new restrictions in places where they are strongly entrenched in power, such as San Francisco or New York."

"Republicans won big, running as Republicans, in 2004. But once they took control of Congress, they started acting like Democrats and lost big. There is a lesson in that somewhere but whether Republicans will learn it is another story entirely."

"Right after liberal Democrats, the most dangerous politicians are country club Republicans."

"As far as party primaries are concerned, both Republican and Democratic Party primaries are dominated by the most zealous voters, whose views may not reflect the views of most members of their own respective parties, much less the views of those who are going to vote in the November general election. In recent times, each election year has seen each party's nominee selected - or at least subject to veto - by its most extreme wing and then forced to try to move back to the center before the general election. This can only undermine the public's confidence in the integrity of the candidates of both parties."

"In a world where young blacks, especially, are bombarded with claims that they are being unfairly targeted by police, and where a general attitude of belligerence is being promoted literally in word and song, it is hard not to wonder whether some people's responses to policemen do not have something to do with the policemen's responses to them. Neither the police nor people in any other occupation always do what is right but automatic belligerence is not the answer."

"'Global warming' is just the latest in a long line of hysterical crusades to which we seem to be increasingly susceptible."

"Although I am ready to defend what I have said, many people expect me to defend what others have attributed to me."

"One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people's motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans-- anything except reason."

"Too often what are called "educated" people are simply people who have been sheltered from reality for years in 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 of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God."

"When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup."

"Some of the most vocal critics of the way things are being done are people who have done nothing themselves, and whose only contributions to society are their complaints and moral exhibitionism."

"Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism."

"Nothing could be more jolting and discordant with the vision of today's intellectuals than the fact that it was businessmen, devout religious leaders and Western imperialists who together destroyed slavery around the world. And if it doesn't fit their vision, it is the same to them as if it never happened."

"It is amazing how many people think that they can answer an argument by attributing bad motives to those who disagree with them. Using this kind of reasoning, you can believe or not believe anything about anything, without having to bother to deal with facts or logic."

"Before the Iraq war I was quite disturbed by some of the neoconservatives, who were saying things like, "What is the point of being a superpower if you can't do such-and-such, take on these responsibilities?" The point of being a superpower is that people will leave you alone."

"I'm always embarrassed when people say that I'm courageous. Soldiers are courageous. Policemen are courageous. Firemen are courageous. I just have a thick hide and disregard what silly people say."

"Walter Williams figured out some years ago that the amount of money needed to move the poor out of poverty would be trivial compared to the amount of money that's spent on these damn programs that are supposed to help the poor but usually don't. But the poor are being used as human shields in the political battle. You put the poor up in front of you as you march across the battlefield and enemy troops won't fire, so you can expand your power, and raise taxes, and so forth."

"Activism is a way for useless people to feel important."

"Intellectuals may like to think of themselves as people who "speak truth to power" but too often they are people who speak lies to gain power."

"To the economically illiterate, if some company makes a million dollars in profit, this means that their products cost a million dollars more than they would have cost without profits. It never occurs to such people that these products might cost several million dollars more to produce if they were produced by enterprises operating without the incentives to be efficient created by the prospect of profits."

"People who think that they are being "exploited" should ask themselves whether they would be missed if they left, or whether people would say: "Good riddance"?"

"The greatness of a free-market economy is that it does not depend upon the wisdom of those who happen to be on top at the moment."

"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong. Know-it-alls in the school system do not lose one dime or one hour's sleep if their bright ideas turn out to be all wrong, or even disastrous, for the child."

"Time was when people used to brag about how old they were -- and I am old enough to remember it."

"I'd say Tom is an empiricist, and by that I mean Tom looks at evidence, and then he makes a diagnosis, and then he offers a therapy for the perceived problem, and then he offers a prognosis, and he's not interested as much, if at all, on how people interpret that or what are the ramifications in contemporary political terms of his argument."

"Perhaps Sowell’s joylessness stems from the fact that his main idea is the hatred of ideas. It is one thing to be an intellectual and love ideas: why else spend so much time reading and thinking about them? When I come across a bad idea, I disagree with it and, as I am doing here, I try to expose its silliness. But I value bad ideas well enough to take them seriously. I write about Thomas Sowell because I recognize in him a fellow intellectual. But it is by no means clear that Sowell recognizes himself as one. He does from time to time note the existence of “conservative and neo-conservative intellectuals” who offer “an alternative vision” to the dominant ideology and whose influence “no longer negligible” in the media. But then Sowell goes on to write as if the only talking heads on television belong to Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky. Safely back to his thesis that intellectuals are always loathsome meddlers who hate capitalism, rationalize evil, and get everything wrong, he is free to quote Eric Hoffer, Paul Johnson, and all like-thinking writers who trod this ground before him."

"Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions is, on the whole, a very stimulating book and it argues a very important point, namely, that the political struggles which will shape our future social and political order are not only, and maybe not even primarily, driven by identifiable interests and by rent-seeking activities that use politics as a pure machinery for the redistribution of material wealth. Sowell rightly reminds us of the genuine power of ideas and visions in the political arena."

"As I said in my review, “Sowell maintains that his purpose in A Conflict of Visions is not to argue for one of the visions he describes but rather to understand the nature of enduring differences in political outlook.” On the other hand, as I also said, it is quite clear where his sympathies lie, and I do not think that any careful reader could fail to conclude from this book that Sowell takes a concern with “results” rather than with “process” to be a fault. An adherent of what he calls the unconstrained vision would not describe that vision in the terms Sowell employs."

"Sowell is misled, I believe, by his own basic strategy of taking familiar controversies about the market as the model for understanding a wide range of fundamental political disagreements. To begin with, the central virtues of competitive markets are not a matter of dispute among most of the theorists whom Sowell discusses. Rawls and Dworkin, for example, make clear their respect for the efficiency of markets as mechanisms for gathering information and allocating resources. What they question is the importance to be given to this kind of efficiency, as compared to other values such as equity and individual autonomy, when we are justifying economic and legal systems. The controversy is thus a moral one that cannot be avoided simply by “leaving it to the process” (i.e., to the market), since to do that would be already to decide the matter. The market is not a neutral means for deciding all social questions, and those who have doubts about its proper role need not claim that they can “do better” than the market in the sense of producing a more efficient outcome. Sowell’s strategy is also misleading in a further way: it overlooks important differences between competitive markets and other processes that he mentions, such as the common law, constitutional government, and the processes through which traditions and languages evolve. Three distinctive features of the market are important here. First, the ideal of the perfectly competitive market is a precise theoretical notion. No actual social institution can be identified with this ideal—since any such institution involves particular legal forms of property and contract, particular imperfections in knowledge, and particular limitations on freedom of entry into the market. But it is frequently quite clear which conditions move a system closer to perfect competition and which ones disrupt it. Second, market institutions (even actual, imperfect ones) produce their outcomes mechanically: prices and employment levels emerge as the result of competition, leaving little need for interpretation. Third, the efficiency of these outcomes is supposed to be a product of the process itself, not something with which any of the participants need be consciously concerned: agents in the perfectly competitive market are assumed to be assiduous pursuers of their own interests, but there is no need for anyone at any stage even to address the question of what would be best from a social point of view."

"Thomas Sowell, an eighty-seven-year-old African American economist, has written more than thirty mind-expanding books. These include his Culture trilogy which (among other things) anticipated Jared Diamond’s ideas in Guns, Germs, and Steel and explains the ubiquity of anti-Semitism; A Conflict of Visions, which identifies the rival theories of the human condition underlying left-wing and right-wing political ideologies; The Quest for Cosmic Justice, which compares this quixotic pursuit with the quest for human justice; Intellectuals and Society, an uncomfortable exposé of the follies of all-star intellectuals; and Late-Talking Children, which anticipated Simon Baron-Cohen’s work on the extreme male brain. Sowell is a libertarian conservative, which makes him taboo in mainstream intellectual circles, but even those who disagree are well advised to grasp his facts and arguments."

"I have a very high likelihood of finding amusement in the things that Thomas Sowell says. It's not what he says so much as the fact that he's saying it. ... Thomas Sowell is very well known for his critique of intellectuals who make claims about society. That's all well and good - he even has some good points in the critique. But I just can't bring myself to take Sowell completely seriously when he puts on his public intellectual hat, precisely because he is so widely identified as an anti-public-intellectual. ... A lot of this is just meant to be in fun - the point of Intellectuals and Society was a good point. Unfortunately, it's often people who complain the loudest about the misbehavior of others that are successful in taking the spotlight off themselves."

"Instead of addressing any concrete issues, Mr. Sowell simply repeats the bluster that intellectuals play rhetorical tricks and avoid arguments. As usual, he provides no details. If teaching consists of repetition, Mr. Sowell is a master. As to the single specific point in Sowell's note—that he in fact offers criticism of contemporary intellectuals, for instance, of myself: Dream on. Sowell cites me in two sentences—that is all—and he cites me in error. In Sowell country, a passing mention or mismention constitutes criticism."