Thomas Sowell believed that there is something to gain even by implementing severely flawed social schemes. This excerpt is from “Blurred Vision, [1]” in Reason Magazine:
What is the point of the ideological crusades of the left? To make the world better? Not primarily, according to Thomas Sowell. The main purpose is to make members of the left feel good, and to do so by placing them in a position of apparent intellectual and moral superiority to the rest of humanity. Leftists, in this book’s terminology, are “the anointed,” and their overriding goal is to distinguish themselves from “the benighted,” which includes everybody else.
The “vision” of the anointed is a world view in which social problems exist because of the negligence or malevolence of the benighted—and thus can be solved by imposing the views of the enlightened few on the rest of society via government action. To believe otherwise—to view social conditions as largely outside of anyone’s control and subject to innumerable trade-offs and constraints—is repugnant to left-leaning political and intellectual elites, Sowell argues, because it robs them of the opportunity to display their superior concern and insight.
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