Thomas Sowell

Random thoughts on the passing scene: Upon learning that the Constitution requires a president to be a natural born citizen, a college student said: “What makes a natural born citizen any more qualified than one born by C-section?” Airlines that keep...

Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem. It was, after all, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brilliant “brains trust” advisers...

It is a good reflection on Americans that they tend to be on the side of the underdog. But it is often hard to tell who is in fact the underdog, or why. Many years ago, there was a big, lumbering catcher named Ernie Lombardi whose slowness afoot was legendary. Someone...

Many years ago, as a small child, I was told one of those old-fashioned fables for children. It was about a dog with a bone in his mouth, who was walking on a log across a stream. The dog looked down into the water and saw his reflection. He thought it was another dog...

“Hubris-laden charlatans” was the way a recent e-mail from a reader characterized the Obama administration. That phrase seems especially appropriate for the Charlatan-in-Chief, Barack Obama, whose speech to a joint session of Congress was both a...

The most important thing about what anyone says are not the words themselves but the credibility of the person who says them. The words of convicted swindler Bernie Madoff were apparently quite convincing to many people who were regarded as knowledgeable and...

Britain’s release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi– the Libyan terrorist whose bomb blew up a plane over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, killing 270 people– is galling enough in itself. But it is even more profoundly troubling as a sign of a larger mood that...

Many of the issues of our times are hard to understand without understanding the vision of the world that they are part of. Whether the particular issue is education, economics or medical care, the preferred explanation tends to be an external explanation– that...

The serious, and sometimes chilling, provisions of the medical care legislation that President Obama has been trying to rush through Congress are important enough for all of us to stop and think, even though his political strategy from the outset has been to prevent...

Amid all the controversies over medical care, no one seems to be asking a very basic question: Why does it take more than 1,000 pages of legislation to insure people who lack medical insurance?   Despite incessant repetition of the fact that millions of Americans...

There was a time when rushing a thousand-page bill through Congress so fast that no one has time to read it would have provoked public outrage. But now, this has been attempted twice in the first 6 months of a new administration. The fact that they got away with it...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: Different people have very different reactions to President Barack Obama. Those who listen to his rhetoric are often inspired, while those who follow what he actually does are often appalled. New York and Chicago have both...

“Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.” We have heard that many times. What is also the price of freedom is the toleration of imperfections. If everything that is wrong with the world becomes a reason to turn more power over to some political savior,...

After many a disappointment with someone, and especially after a disaster, we may be able to look back at numerous clues that should have warned us that the person we trusted did not deserve our trust. When that person is the President of the United States, the...

Many people hoped that the election of a black President of the United States would mark our entering a “post-racial” era, when we could finally put some ugly aspects of our history behind us. That is quite understandable. But it takes two to tango. Those...

Is there a coherent argument for government-controlled medical care or are slogans and hysteria considered sufficient? We hear endlessly about how many Americans don’t have health insurance. But, if we stop and think– which politicians hope we never...

Sometimes, when I hear about “disparities” and “inequities,” I think of a disparity that applied directly to me– the disparity in basketball ability between myself and Michael Jordan. When I was in school, I was so awful in basketball...

Much of the backlog of cases in our over-burdened courts has been created by the courts themselves, with adventurous judicial “interpretations” of laws that leave a large gray area of uncertainty around even the most plainly written legislation. Lawyers of...

While the recent Supreme Court decision in the New Haven firefighters’ case will be welcome news to those who don’t think that a gross injustice is O.K. when those on the receiving end are white, the reasoning behind the 5 to 4 decision is a painful...

For the fourth time in six cases, the Supreme Court of the United States has reversed a decision for which Judge Sonia Sotomayor voted on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. If this nominee were a white male, would this not raise questions about whether he should be...