gavel Government Intervention
State involvement in economic affairs
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View Full Quote"You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state."
View Full Quote"There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you're doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I'm not so careful about the content of the present, but I'm very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else's money on myself. And if I spend somebody else's money on myself, then I'm sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else's money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else's money on somebody else, I'm not concerned about how much it is, and I'm not concerned about what I get. And that's government."
View Full Quote"I don't believe that we shall ever have good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government. Because we can't take them violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly or round-about way introduce something they can't stop."
"Great nations are never impoverished by private, though they sometimes are by public prodigality and misconduct."
menu_book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
View Full Quote"To sell below the just price is loss to the seller; to buy above it is loss to the buyer. The prince cannot without injustice compel men to sell below the common price, for this is to force them to give what is theirs to others without compensation."
menu_book De Iustitia et Iure (On Justice and Law)
View Full Quote"The pattern is: (1) The anointed assert that there is some grave danger or crisis. (2) The anointed propose some course of action to deal with it. (3) Evidence that the proposed course of action has made things worse is either ignored or explained away. (4) The anointed proceed as if the policy were working, blaming any remaining problems on the inadequacy of commitment to the policy."
menu_book The Vision of the Anointed
View Full QuoteView Full Quote"There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs. And you try to get the best trade-off you can get. That's all you can hope for."
"In the unconstrained vision, human nature is not fixed but is capable of being changed by social institutions and social policies. If human beings are capable of improvement — even of perfection — then the question of how to design the best society, with the best social institutions, is a much more open-ended question than if human nature is treated as a given constraint."
menu_book A Conflict of Visions
View Full Quoteauto_stories Books
A Conflict of Visions
Sowell's landmark 1987 work arguing that the deepest divide in political and social thought is not between left and right, but between two fundamen...
Read MoreThe Vision of the Anointed
The 1995 sequel to *A Conflict of Visions*, focusing specifically on the unconstrained vision as held by a self-appointed intellectual elite — 'the...
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