Thomas Sowell has published a large volume of writing. His dozen books, as well as numerous articles and essays, cover a wide range of topics, from classic economic theory to judicial activism, from civil rights to choosing the right college. Please contact your local newspaper editor if you want to read the THOMAS SOWELL column in your hometown paper.
If anyone had any doubts about whether Al Gore was going to try to run for president again in 2004, his speech in San Francisco on September 23rd should have put those doubts to rest. The former vice president was in top form, doing what he does best — making an...
In a commercial that ran during the Christmas-New Years holidays a few years ago, the husband was trying to keep an old car patched up, while the wife wanted him to get a new one. At the end, the wife asks: “Should old acquaintance be forgot?” And she...
If the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall.
Someone once asked why television was called a medium. The answer was that it was seldom well done. TV’s wall-to-wall coverage of the September 11th anniversary — on virtually all channels and around the clock — was a painful example of the fact that...
Vice President Dick Cheney’s speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on the need to end Saddam Hussein’s terrorist regime in Iraq was a much-needed dose of cold, hard reality. Those who are wringing their hands over the possibility of a pre-emptive strike...
While we ought to learn from our own experiences, it is even better to learn from other people’s experiences, saving ourselves the painful costs of the lessons. In the case of the dominant educational fads of our times, many have been tried out before in other...
One of the objections by the educational establishment to state-mandated tests for students is that this forces the teachers to teach directly the material that is going to be tested, instead of letting the students “discover” what they need to know...
Florida’s school year has already started early, so that its students will have more preparation before the state-mandated tests that will be administered to them later in the school year. Meanwhile, there is much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth because...
In the old-time comic strip “Li’l Abner,” one of the characters revealed that a new stranger in town had spent many years in reform school. Another character replied, “Well, he must be reformed by now.” Unfortunately, the same gullibility...
There was a painful irony in an upbeat newspaper story about a man of modest income who was able to continue living in San Mateo County, California, only because he could rent a government-subsidized apartment for $850 a month. Without the subsidy, the rent would...
A black man waiting at a bus stop called to me as I was bicycling down the street: “You’re the first black man I have seen over here in a long time.” “It will be a long time before you see the next one,” I said, and we both laughed. In a...
The one monumental fact that is being ignored in all the political schemes to bring down the cost of pharmaceutical drugs is that it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to develop one successful new medicine. No matter how cleverly the politicians try to shift those...
Now that we have all breathed a sigh of relief at the rescue of the miners trapped underground in Somerset, Pa., perhaps we might reconsider some of the things that send men down into such hazardous places to get us the fuel to power our economy. The cost of coal is...
What can be even worse than a stock market crash — including the great crash of 1929 — are politicians rushing in to fix things. At one time, it was widely assumed that the 1929 crash led directly to the Great Depression that lasted throughout the decade...
While much attention has been focused on the trial of American Taliban John Walker Lindh, another trial halfway around the world may be more relevant to our own future. This was the trial in Pakistan of terrorists who killed Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl....
One of the latest in the seemingly endless rounds of alarming statistics is that one out of 12 American children has some form of disability. With all the things that are supposedly getting worse, you have to wonder how our life expectancy keeps increasing. A cynic...
A recent front-page story in The New York Times was headlined: “In Ecuador’s Banana Fields, Child Labor is Key to Profits.” This is part of an ongoing orgy of indignation by the intelligentsia at low-paid labor in the Third World. The question they...
In a stunning reversal, California’s liberal Senator Barbara Boxer has come out in favor of allowing airline pilots to carry guns if they wish, while the Bush administration opposes it. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives has passed a bill to permit pilots...
Opponents of school vouchers have grown desperate in the wake of the Supreme Court’s refusal to outlaw vouchers as violations of the First Amendment. And desperation seldom produces clarity of thought. It was particularly painful to read an outburst by Cynthia...
Did anyone ever call Franklin D. Roosevelt a “Dutch American” or Dwight Eisenhower a “German American”? It would have been resented, not only by them and their supporters, but by Americans in general. These men were Americans — not...
Most discussions of the problems of American education have an air of utter unreality because they avoid addressing the most fundamental and intractable problem of our public schools — the low quality of our teachers. There is no point expecting teachers to...
Random thoughts on the passing scene: A magician was asked what had happened to the lady he used to saw in half in his act. “Oh, she’s retired,” he said. “Now she lives in Chicago — and Denver.” Despite the rhetoric of the...
Bill O’Reilly of “The O’Reilly Factor” is one of the few major media figures who does not hesitate to criticize Jesse Jackson, so it was appropriate that the author of a critical new book about Jackson appeared on that program. The book is...
While Senator Barbara Boxer is trying to get the federal government to declare more than two million acres in California off-limits to development, California’s other Senator, Diane Feinstein, has already brokered a deal that takes 16,500 acres off-limits....
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