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POPS Thomas Sowell: Random Thoughts
But what this means is that even the record-breaking federal deficit understates the government's real financial liabilities, because agencies like FDIC and the Federal Housing Authority are likely to need increased amounts of money to keep going. An e-mail from a reader says that liberals like to take the moral high ground, even though their own moral relativism means that there is no moral high ground. I doubt whether the man responsible for the massacre at Fort Hood will pay with his life for the lives that he took. He may well be free again someday. We can only hope that he does not get a hero's welcome when he arrives in some terror-sponsoring country, the way the Lockerbie bomber did. A recent study by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights showed that, after the housing boom and bust, blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asian Americans and American Indians all reduced their subprime mortgage loans. Only politicians seem not to have learned anything from the economic disaster ...
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POPSThe ‘Costs’ of Medical Care by Thomas Sowell NRO countries where the medical training may not be the best. In short, reducing doctors’ income is not reducing the cost of medical care, it is refusing to pay those costs. Like other ways of refusing to pay costs, it has consequences. Any one of us can reduce medical costs by refusing to pay them. In our own lives, we recognize the consequences. But when someone with a gift for rhetoric tells us that the government can reduce the costs without consequences, we are ready to believe in such political miracles. There are some ways in which the real costs of medical care can be reduced, but the people who are leading the charge for a government takeover of medical care are not the least bit interested in actually reducing those costs, as distinguished from shifting the costs around or just refusing to pay them. The high costs of “defensive medicine” " expensive tests, medications, and procedures required to protect doctors and hospitals from ruinous lawsuits, rather than
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POPS Dismantling America by Thomas Sowell life and death decisions about your loved ones? Does any of this sound like America? How about a federal agency giving school children material to enlist them on the side of the president? Merely being assigned to sing his praises in class is apparently not enough. How much of America would be left if the federal government continued on this path? President Obama has already floated the idea of a national police force, something we have done without for more than two centuries. We already have local police forces all across the country and military forces for national defense, as well as the FBI for federal crimes and the National Guard for local emergencies. What would be the role of a national police force created by Barack Obama, with all its leaders appointed by him? It would seem more like the brown shirts of dictators than like anything American. Those who say that the Obama administration should have investigated those people more thoroughly before appointing .
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POPSMagic Numbers in Politics: Part II by Thomas Sowell Bluntly, it means more severe injuries and death. Many of the same people who protest against "trading blood for oil" when it comes to military interventions in the Middle East seem not to see that higher miles per gallon can also mean trading blood for oil. The magic number du jour is the number of Americans without health insurance. Apparently getting more people insured is another "good thing"-- which is to say, it is something whose costs are not to be weighed against the benefits, or whose costs are to be finessed aside with optimistic projections or a claim that these costs can be covered by eliminating "waste, fraud and abuse." In real life, people weigh one thing against another. But in politics one declares one thing to be imperative, so the issue then becomes how we do it. In real life, all sorts of desirable things are not done, either because of other desirable things that would have to be sacrificed to do it or because of the dangers incurred .
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POPSThe Brainy Bunch by Thomas Sowell based on those beliefs and hatreds. Starting from a position of Germany's military weakness in the early 1930s, Hitler not only built up Germany's war-making potential, he did so in ways that minimized the danger that his potential victims would match his military build-up with their own. He said whatever soothing words they wanted to hear that would spare them the cost of military deterrence and the pain of contemplating another war. He played some of the most highly educated people of his time for fools-- not only foreign political leaders but also members of the intelligentsia. The editor of The Times of London filtered out reports that his own foreign correspondents in Germany sent him about the evils and dangers of the Nazis. In the United States, W.E.B. Du Bois-- with a Ph.D. from Harvard-- said that dictatorship in Germany was "absolutely necessary to get the state in order." In an age when facts seem to carry less weight than the visions of
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POPS Listening to a Liar by Thomas Sowell If this is such an urgently needed program, why wait for years to put it into effect? And if the public is going to benefit from this, why not let them experience those benefits before the next Presidential election? If it is not urgent that the legislation goes into effect immediately, then why don't we have time to go through the normal process of holding Congressional hearings on the pros and cons, accompanied by public discussions of its innumerable provisions? What sense does it make to "hurry up and wait" on something that is literally a matter of life and death? If we do not believe that the President is stupid, then what do we believe? The only reasonable alternative seems to be that he wanted to get this massive government takeover of medical care passed into law before the public understood what was in it. Moreover, he wanted to get re-elected in 2012 before the public experienced what its actual consequences would be.
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POPSA Masterpiece Of Charlatanry For The Naive By Thomas Sowell should ask themselves where he is going to conjure up the additional doctors, nurses and hospitals needed to take care of millions more patients. If he can't pull off that miracle, then government-run medical care in the United States can be expected to produce what government-run medical care in Canada, Britain and other countries has produced " delays of weeks or months to get many treatments, not to mention arbitrary rationing decisions by bureaucrats. Obama can deny it in words, but what matter are deeds " and no one's words have been more repeatedly the direct opposite of his deeds " whether talking about how his election campaign would be financed, how he would not rush legislation through Congress, or how his administration was not going to go after CIA agents for their past efforts to extract information from captured terrorists. President Obama has also declared emphatically that he will not interfere in the internal affairs of other nations "
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POPSWelfare, Thomas Sowell This was in 1980 when the collapse of the black family was fairly non-existent and the entrapment was not near as severe.
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POPS Suicide of the West? by Thomas Sowell the idea of a "war on terror"-- as if that will stop the terrorists' war on us. The ostensible reason for releasing al-Megrahi was compassion for a man terminally ill. It is ironic that this was said in Scotland, for exactly 250 years ago another Scotsman-- Adam Smith-- said, "Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent." Tragically, those with this strange inversion of values include the Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder. Although President Obama has said that he does not want to revisit the past, this is only the latest example of how his administration's actions are the direct opposite of his lofty words. It is not just a question of looking backward. The decision to second-guess CIA agents who extracted information to save American lives is even worse when you look forward. This is not simply an injustice to those who have tried to keep this country safe, it is a danger recklessly imposed on future Americans whose safety cannot always be guaranteed
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POPS Whose Medical Decisions? by Thomas Sowell Nowhere? Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is "Special Advisor for Health Policy" for the Obama administration. That's nowhere? He is also co-author of an article on Americans' "over-utilization" of medical care in the June 18, 2008 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Is that nowhere? Dr. Emanuel's article points out that Americans do not visit doctors or go into hospitals more than people in other industrialized countries. In fact we go to both places less often than people do in those other countries, which include countries with government-controlled medical care. As the article points out, "It is more costly care, rather than high volume, that accounts for higher expenditures in the United States." There are more Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) devices per capita in the United State . . . Americans also have more of what the article calls "amenities" with their medical care. "Hospital rooms in the United States offer more privacy, comfort and auxiliary service
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POPSFor The Record ~ Thomas Sowell But where are Americans to turn if we become like Canada? Where are we to go when we need better medical treatment than Washington bureaucrats will let us have? Mexico? The Caribbean?"--- Hoover Institution economist Thomas Sowell
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POPSQuitter Sarah Palin Reaches New Low Below are the words of quitter Sarah Palin about health care reform. She suggests that under an Obama plan, her child and elderly parents might have to go before a "death panel" to see if they should live or die. All she needs to do now is assault someone at a public meeting to fully join the right-wing goons whose fear-mongering mentality she shares.
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POPS A Post-Racial President? by Thomas Sowell Anyone who can believe that Obama did not understand what the racist rants of Jeremiah Wright meant can believe anything. With race-- as with campaign finance, transparency and the rest-- Barack Obama knows what the public wants to hear and that is what he has said. But his policies as president have been the opposite of his rhetoric, with race as with other issues. As a state senator in Illinois, Obama pushed the "racial profiling" issue, so it is hardly surprising that he jumped to the conclusion that a policeman was racial profiling when in fact the cop was investigating a report received from a neighbor that someone seemed to be breaking into the house that Professor Gates was renting in Cambridge. For those who are interested in facts-- and these obviously do not include President Obama-- there has been a serious study of racial profiling in a book titled "Are Cops Racist?" by Heather Mac Donald. Her analysis of the data shows how this issue
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POPSThe Housing Boom and Bust Thomas Sowell reason : Is the economic downturn caused by the housing boom and bust the worst economic circumstance of your lifetime? Thomas Sowell : Since I was born in 1930 the economic crisis with the most impact of my lifetime was the Great Depression. As to whether this will match that, it’s too early to tell. Right now it certainly is nothing comparable to the Great Depression, but the Great Depression began as nothing comparable to the Great Depression. For the first 12 months after the stock market crash , unemployment never reached double digits but the solution turned out to create more disasters than the problem they were trying to solve. Whether that will happen again depends on how far and how long the current administration will push policies to solve the present crisis and what their repercussions will be. As mentioned in the book, parallel to the 1929 crash was the stock market crash of 1987. That had the potential to create another Great Depression
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POPS Equality on Trial by Thomas Sowell Performance matters. And Judge Sotomayor's performance provides no reason for putting her on the Supreme Court. Although the case of the Connecticut firefighters is the latest and best-known of Judge Sotomayor's reversals by the Supreme Court, an even more revealing case was Didden v. Village of Port Chester, where the Supreme Court openly rebuked the unanimous three-judge panel that included Judge Sotomayor for "an evident denial of the most elementary forms of procedural due process." Too much that Sonia Sotomayor has said and done over the years places her squarely in the camp of those supporting a racial spoils system instead of equal treatment for all. The organizations she has belonged to, as well as the statements she has made repeatedly -- not just an isolated slip of the tongue taken "out of context"-- as well as her dismissing the white firefighters' case that the Supreme Court heard and heeded, all point in the same direction.
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POPS Thomas Sowell Thomas, I said two years ago, I said look, they're going to go for the car companies and the airlines and for the energy industry. They're going to go for the financial industry. There was like four of them that I lined up, and I said we're going down this fascist road. I don't know why people aren't marching in front of the Capitol or surrounding the Capitol with their lawn chairs and just saying you ain't leaving until you change all this nonsense. What's it going to take? SOWELL: Well to do that, they would have to sink. And this whole personality cult has caught on in such a way that it is going to be a while before people start thinking. It is a question of how big of a calamity is it going to take before they snap out of it.
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POPSGovernment's Current Role in Business is 'Route' to Fascism Sowell argued it would take a “calamity” for people to realize that fascism is taking place – the issue being just how big it would be before the public could connect the dots. “Well to do that, they would have to think,” Sowell explained. “And this whole personality cult has caught on in such a way that it is going to be a while before people start thinking. It is a question of how big of a calamity is it gonna take before they snap out of it.” It didn't start with Obama.
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POPSObama Keeps Shredding The Constitution Appointing judges to the federal courts -- including the Supreme Court -- who believe in expanding the powers of the federal government to make arbitrary decisions, choosing who will be winners and losers in the economy and in the society, is perfectly consistent with a vision of the world where self-confident and self-righteous elites rule according to their own notions, instead of merely governing under the restraints of the Constitution." --Hoover Institution economist Thomas Sowell http://www.patriotpost.us/opinion/thomas-sowell/2009/05/07/empathy-versus-law-part-iii.html
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POPS Survival Optional by Thomas Sowell Nobody in those days confused bending over backward with "the rule of law," as Barack Obama did recently. Bending over backward is the antithesis of the rule of law. It is depriving the people of the protection of their laws, in order to pander to mushy notions among the elite. Terrorists-- "militants" or "insurgents" for those of you who are squeamish-- have declared open-ended war against America. It is open-ended in time and open-ended in methods, including beheadings of innocent civilians. President Obama can ban the phrase "war on terror" but he cannot ban the terrorists' war on us. That war continues, so there is no reason to turn terrorists loose before it ends. They chose to make it that kind of war. We don't need to risk American lives to prove that we are nicer than they are. Those who choose to live outside those laws, whether terrorists or pirates, can be-- and have been-- shot on sight.
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POPSA Rookie President By Thomas Sowell and that is a dangerous way to impress dangerous people. What did his televised overture to the Iranians accomplish, except to reassure them that he was not going to do a damn thing to stop them from getting a nuclear bomb? It is a mistake that can go ringing down the corridors of history. Future generations who live in the shadow of that nuclear threat may wonder what we were thinking about, putting our lives — and theirs — in the hands of a rookie because we liked his style and symbolism? Seeking deals with our adversaries, behind the backs of our allies? The French did that at Munich back in 1938. They threw Czechoslovakia to the wolves and, less than two years later, Hitler gobbled up France anyway. This year, President Obama’s attempt to make a backdoor deal with the Russians, behind the backs of the NATO countries, was not only rejected but made public by the Russians — a sign of contempt and a warning to our allies not to put too much trust in the United States.
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POPS Cheap Political Theater by Thomas Sowell . . . . including commonsense standards for making home loans. Politicians and bureaucrats micro-managing the mortgage sector of the economy is precisely how today's economic disaster began. Why anyone would think that their micro-managing the automobile industry, or executive pay across a wide sweep of other industries, is likely to make things better in the economy is a mystery. The real point is to pander to envy and resentment against people who make a lot of money. Envy is always referred to by its political alias, "social justice." But to put the lives of the wives and children of executives at risk for the sake of Beltway grandstanding shows how low our political saviors have sunk. We are not yet a banana republic, though that is the direction in which some of our politicians are taking us-- This political theater is in one sense cheap beyond words. In another sense, it is costly beyond words.
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POPSSubsidizing Bad Decisions By Thomas Sowell and as if the people facing foreclosures are the only people that matter. What if the foreclosures are not stopped? Will millions of homes just sit empty? Or will new people move into those homes, now selling for lower prices-- prices perhaps more within the means of the new occupants? The same politicians who have been talking about a need for "affordable housing" for years are now suddenly alarmed that home prices are falling. How can housing become more affordable unless prices fall? The political meaning of "affordable housing" is housing that is made more affordable by politicians intervening to create government subsidies, rent control or other gimmicks for which politicians can take credit. Affordable housing produced by market forces provides no benefit to politicians and has no attraction for them. Study after study, not only here but in other countries, show that the most affordable housing is where there has been the least . . .
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POPS Reparations For Slavery? http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- Thomas Sowell --- THE FIRST THING to understand about the issue of reparations for slavery is that no money is going to be paid. The very people who are demanding reparations know it is not going to happen. Why then are they demanding something that they know they are not going to get? Because the demagogues themselves will benefit, even if nobody else does. Stirring up historic grievances pays off in publicity and votes. Some are saying that Congress should at least issue an official apology for slavery. But slavery is not something you apologize for, any more than you apologize for murder. You apologize for accidentally stepping on someone's toes or for playing your TV too loud at night. But, if you have ever enslaved anybody, an apology is not going to cut it. And if you never enslaved anybody, then what are you apologizing for?
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POPS The Tyranny Of Words ~ Thomas Sowell Republicans have always had more people who would make good presidents than people who would make good presidential candidates. So long as we have a democracy, that distinction is crucial. They say talk is cheap. But in fact it can be devastatingly expensive. Among the generation of Germans who were enthralled by Hitler's eloquence, millions paid with their lives and their children's lives for empowering this demagogue to lead them to ruin and infamy.
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POPS A Fatal Trajectory by Thomas Sowell Yet the only serious obstacle to that happening is that the Israelis may disregard the lofty blather coming out of the White House and destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities before the Iranian fanatics can destroy Israel. If by some miracle we manage to avoid the fatal dangers of a nuclear Iran, there will no doubt be others, including a nuclear North Korea. Although, in some sense, the United States of America is still the strongest nation on earth militarily, that means absolutely nothing if our enemies are willing to die and we are not. It took only two nuclear bombs to get Japan to surrender — and the Japanese of that era were far tougher than most Americans today. Just one bomb — dropped on New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles — might be enough to get us to surrender. If we are still made of sterner stuff than it looks like, then it might take two or maybe even three or four nuclear bombs, but we will surrender.
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POPSEconomic Truth: Walter Williams & Thomas Sowell on Video The second video with Sowell/Rose which says image not available, is INCORRECT. click on video to play, also, it's a long version of my previous clipped youtube video. :D (Guilty: I must admit that I did have to smile when listening to Sowell's assessment of John McCain..). Meanwhile, the band played on on the deck of the Titanic... What was that word again? What is it 'the definition of' when one continues to try the same strategy multiple times, yet somehow expects a different result? ... Ah, yes. Insanity. DiscerningTexan, 2/09/2009
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POPSTemporary Slavery Called "Service" Is Still Temporary Slavery The letter immediately following mine is better: Dan Rodricks' column "Americans poised to heed Obama's call to service" advocates national service. He favors not just voluntary service but paid service - that is, a government jobs program in which bureaucrats decide how to spend even more of our tax dollars. That's bad enough. But then Mr. Rodricks goes the extra step and suggests that the national service program should be mandatory. Forced labor is slavery, whether the slaves are paid with room and board or with money. Let's not pretend mandatory national service is anything but a sanitized form of slavery. It's a shameful idea in a country that's supposed to stand for freedom. David Page Baltimore
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POPS What Are They Buying? by Thomas Sowell Crises have long been seen as great opportunities to expand the federal government's power while the people are too scared to object and before any opposition can get organized. That is why there is such haste to do things that will take effect slowly. What are the Beltway politicians buying with all the hundreds of billions of dollars they are spending? They are buying what politicians are most interested in-- power. This administration and Congress are now in a position to do what Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression of the 1930s-- use a crisis of the times to create new institutions that will last for generations. To this day, we are still subsidizing millionaires in agriculture because farmers were having a tough time in the 1930s. We have the Federal National Mortgage Association ("Fannie Mae") taking reckless chances in the housing market that have blown up in our faces today, because FDR decided to create a new federal housing agency in 1938.
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POPS The Economic "Stimulus" by Thomas Sowell It was not just a gift of money-- huge though that is-- it is also a gift of exemption from Republican criticism, even for the bailout of General Motors, which President Bush began, even when Congress refused to give GM the money without preconditions. It is a political get-out-of-jail-free card that can cover whatever disasters the Democrats create on their own in the years ahead. Does spending on infrastructure mean that the money is going to be spent filling potholes and repairing bridges? Or will it be spent creating new things? One of the key reasons why infrastructure gets neglected, in the first place, is that there is very little political pay-off to filling potholes and repairing bridges, compared to spending that same money creating community centers, bike paths and other things. These new things create opportunities for ribbon-cutting ceremonies that give politicians favorable free publicity in the media.
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