Thomas Sowell

Barack Obama says that we have to “jolt” the economy. That certainly makes sense, if you take the media’s account of the economy seriously– but should the media be taken seriously? Amid all the political and media hysteria, national output has...

Among the many new “rights” being conjured out of thin air, a new one seems to be a “right” to win. Americans have long had the right to put their candidates and their ideas to a vote. Now there seems to be a sense that your rights have been...

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live in a world where there were no prices? If you happened to want a Rolex or a Rolls-Royce, you could just go get one– or two if you wanted– and not have to worry about ugly little things like price tags. There is such a...

Some elections are routine, some are important and some are historic. If Senator John McCain wins this election, it will probably go down in history as routine. But if Senator Barack Obama wins, it is more likely to be historic– and catastrophic. Once the...

Among all the people who are now scrambling to get on the Obama bandwagon, none is likely to impress more people than Colin Powell– especially people who know no more about the specifics of Colin Powell’s actions than the specifics of Barack Obama’s....

Chief Justice John Marshall said it all in one sentence: “The power to tax is the power to destroy.” It is not the money that is taxed away that is destroyed. What is destroyed is the wealth that does not get produced in the first place, because high taxes...

One of the biggest and most long-lasting “change” to expect if Barack Obama becomes President of the United States is in the kinds of federal judges he appoints. These include Supreme Court justices, as well as other federal justices all across the...

Telling a friend that the love of his life is a phony and dangerous is not likely to get him to change his mind. But it may cost you a friend. It is much the same story with true believers in Barack Obama. They have made up their minds and not only don’t want to...

One of the oldest phenomena of American elections– criticism of one’s opponent– has in recent times been stigmatized by much of the media as “negative advertising.” Is this because the criticism has gotten more vicious or more personal?...

What about those “real issues” that Barack Obama’s supporters in the media say we should get back to, whenever some new unsavory fact about his past comes out? Surely education is a real issue, with American school children consistently scoring below...

Critics of Senator Barack Obama make a strategic mistake when they talk about his “past associations.” That just gives his many defenders in the media an opportunity to counter-attack against “guilt by association.” We all have associations,...

Congress is never more ridiculous than when it tries to look like it is serious. In the midst of a major national financial crisis, what was one of the first things Congress zeroed in on? The pay of Chief Executive Officers of financial institutions. If all those CEOs...

Nothing could more painfully demonstrate what is wrong with Congress than the current financial crisis. Among the Congressional “leaders” invited to the White House to devise a bailout “solution” are the very people who have for years created...

Estimates of how much money a government program will cost are notoriously unreliable. Estimates of the cost of the current bailout in the financial markets run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and some say it may reach or exceed a trillion. Many people have...

Who was it who said, “crack-brained meddling by the authorities” can “aggravate an existing crisis”? Ronald Reagan? Milton Friedman? Adam Smith? Not even close. It was Karl Marx. Unlike most leftists today, Marx studied economics. Is the...

Sometimes you don’t know when you are lucky. Certainly I did not consider myself lucky when I left home at seventeen and discovered the hard way that there was no great demand for a black teenage dropout with no experience and no skill. In retrospect, however,...

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.

Conservatives, as well as liberals, would undoubtedly be happier living in the kind of world envisioned by the left. Very few people have either a vested interest or an ideological preference for a world in which there are many inequalities. Even fewer would prefer a...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: If you took all the fraud out of politics, there might not be a lot left. The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical...

What is happening in the republic of Georgia is all too reminiscent of what happened back in 1956, when Russian tanks rolled into Hungary– and the West did nothing. An argument might well be made that, realistically, there was nothing the West could have...

We take it for granted that a vote means a secret ballot but it was not always that way. Moreover, it will not remain that way for workers who vote on whether or not they want a labor union, if legislation sponsored by Congressional Democrats and endorsed by Senator...