Thomas Sowell

Cats are supposed to have nine lives but fallacies must have at least ninety. Some notions will be believed, no matter how many times they have been refuted by facts. One of these seemingly immortal fallacies is the implicit assumption that our enemies have unlimited...

During the recent election campaign, it has been a liberal mantra that they “support the troops” while opposing the war in Iraq. Just what does supporting the troops mean — other than just a throwaway line to escape the political consequences of a...

Election frauds are nothing new and neither are political frauds in general. The oldest fraud is the belief that the political left is the party of the poor and the downtrodden. The election results in California are only the latest evidence to give the lie to that...

Although more people voted for President Bush than for any other President in American history, it was still a narrow victory — and a narrow escape for this great nation. Can you imagine what it would be like to have a Massachusetts liberal filling the federal...

As if to prove that the Dan Rather forged document scandal was not just an isolated incident, CBS News was ready to run another bogus story against President Bush on “60 Minutes” — right before the election — until an old NBC report surfaced,...

There is a lot of inertia in politics. The “solid South” voted for Democrats in every Presidential election for more than a century. Blacks have voted for every Democratic candidate for President from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Al Gore. The Jewish vote has...

The latest irresponsible charge from John Kerry is that President Bush let Osama bin Laden escape. You would think we had bin Laden in custody and Bush left the door open. We never “let” bin Laden escape. We never had him. Bush didn’t even have...

While many people are urging us to vote — regardless of for whom, for what, or for what reason — there are very few urging us to do what is far more important: Stop and think! Voting is not a matter of personal expression but a serious responsibility for...

With the election season coming into the home stretch, the cry of “Tax cuts for the rich!” is ringing out across the land from Democrats desperate to regain power in Washington . Like many other political slogans, its popularity depends on slippery words...

Who said, “if you hold your fire until you see the whites of his eyes, you will never know what hit you”? It was President Franklin D. Roosevelt and he said it on May 27, 1941. It applies even more today. If you are going to go to war against terrorists in...

As if Dan Rather’s use of forged documents to try to discredit President Bush shortly before the election was not enough of a clue to the mainstream media’s political agenda, ABC News has now joined CBS News in the political spin game. What ABC News has...

Nowhere is the tyranny of visions more absolute than with issues involving safety. Attempts to talk about costs, trade-offs or diminishing returns are only likely to provoke safety zealots to respond with something like, “If it saves just one human life, it is...

Some people think of California as a place where many kooky ideas originate. It is that but there is more to it than that. California has long had more than its fair share of busybodies with a vision of the world in which it is necessary for them to force other people...

At long last there is some reconsideration of the child molestation hysteria that has sent innocent people to jail for long terms behind bars, often with zero evidence and with testimony from children who have been heavily pressured or manipulated by...

A joke has President Bush and the Pope sailing down the Potomac on the Presidential yacht. The wind blows the Pontiff’s cap off and it falls into the water. President Bush orders the yacht stopped, gets off and walks across the water to retrieve the Pope’s...

Every election year there are great alarms in the media that not enough Americans vote. Supposedly this shows that there is something wrong at the core of our society. In reality, societies where different groups are at each other’s throats often have high voter...

Current Senate hearings on “mandatory retirement” may have more than a little relevance to the huge question of how to “save” Social Security. Unfortunately, there is far too little attention being paid to the question of why Social Security...

Would you sign a contract that enabled the other party to change the terms of that contract at will, while you could neither stop him nor make any changes of your own? Probably not. Yet that is exactly what happens when you pay money into Social Security. No matter...

If someone applied to you for a job but didn’t want to talk about what he has been doing in the last 20 years, wouldn’t you be suspicious? Might you not think he was insulting your intelligence by expecting you to hire him on the basis of what he did...

Back in 1939, when Senator Daniel Inouye was a teenager, he attended a Japanese language school in Hawaii. He was appalled to discover that it was also a center for political propaganda, urging young Japanese Americans like himself to remember that they were Japanese...

CBS newscaster Dan Rather apparently thinks that the best defense is a good offense. After an ever-growing number of document experts have turned up an ever-growing number of discrepancies to indicate that the document he relied on to smear President Bush’s...