Thomas Sowell

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 and sloppy...

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 done was too...

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 worth...

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 "experts."...

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 cap. The...

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 requires saving in the...

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 decades ago? Yet...

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 National...

In the wake of the hurricanes in Florida, the state's attorney general has received thousands of complaints of "price gouging" by stores, hotels, and others charging far higher prices than usual during this emergency. "Price gouging" is one of those emotionally...

Our current unemployment rate -- 5.4 percent -- is one of the lowest in the world and one of the lowest in our own history. Why then the hysteria about jobs? Because this is an election year and Senator Kerry is desperate for some issue that will rescue his faltering...

Jobs have become a big issue in this election year -- which means that it is optimistic to expect a rational discussion. Nothing is discussed more irrationally than "outsourcing." It is obviously completely misleading to discuss how many jobs American companies are...

Our hearts automatically go out to the people of Florida, who are being battered by a series of hurricanes in rapid succession. But we have brains as well as hearts -- and the time is long overdue to start using them. Hurricanes come through Florida every year about...