Thomas Sowell Quotes

Excellent collection of quotes by economist Thomas Sowell:

Here are a few of my favorites:

"Intellect is not wisdom”

“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”

"The truth is often not complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.”

"The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is. He confuses it with feeling”

“The great escape of our times is escape from personal responsibility for the consequences of one’s own behavior.”

“When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.”

"There's now a world in which the success of others is a grievance, rather than an example"

“Since this is an era of 'fairness' & 'social justice... what is your 'fair share' of what someone else has worked for?”

"One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and again.” 

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Milton Friedman Points to the Lack of Viable Alternatives to Capitalism

Milton Friedman schools Phil Donahue on the lack of alternatives to capitalism:

The full interview:

This interview occurred in 1979, when people often sat down to talk with people even when they had disagreements.

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Some Hope for Insulin Users, Courtesy of the Revived U.S. Antitrust Division

Excerpt from Matt Stoller's website:

[O]n Thursday, the FTC voted to resurrect the Robinson-Patman Act, a bill prohibiting corporate bribery and price discrimination by middlemen that hasn’t been meaningfully enforced since the 1970s. I wrote several chapters in my book on the titanic fight in the 1930s to tame chain stores with this law, and the equally vicious conflict in the 1970s to stop enforcing it. The end of RPA enforcement is why chain stores like Walmart and Amazon took over our retail space, and why dominant middlemen control every area of our economy at this point. It’s worth noting that Robert Bork’s most hated statute was the Robinson-Patman Act, and he considered it a tremendous victory that he helped end the enforcement of the law.

So what happened at the FTC? All five commissioners voted on a policy statement saying that the use of rebates by dominant middlemen in the insulin market were a potential violation of different laws under the jurisdiction of the FTC, including the Robinson-Patman Act. This vote is a signal to every private antitrust lawyer, state attorney general, and judge, that the Robinson-Patman Act can once again be dusted off and used.

Insulin is a great test case for this law, because everyone knows how unfair and inefficient the insulin market truly is. It’s a medication that has been around since 1922, and yet it has been increasing in cost every year for decades. And while the three main producers engage in all sorts of schemes to push up cost, most of the high cost of insulin is actually a result the middlemen named pharmacy benefits managers - CVS Caremark, Cigna (Express Scripts), and United Healthcare (OptumRx) - who manage and control how medicine is priced and sold. PBMs demand rebates of up to 70% for the right to have an insulin company sell their product to patients. These rebates in turn massively drive up the price of insulin.

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Matt Stoller Discusses the Overconcentration of Economic and Political Power in Many American Industries

I've followed Matt Stoller for months and I now support his Substack newsletter. He discusses the over-concentrations of power in many places. This is incredibly important to having a meaningful understanding about what is going on in Washington DC. Mere Supply and Demand does NOT explain what is going on, contrary to many economists.

Krystal and Saagar talk at length with policy expert Matt Stoller about the monopolization of the American economy, supply chain shocks, corruption in government, consumer culture, meat packing consolidation, the anti-trust movement and more.

From Stoller's first Substack newsletter:

You see, I was taught basic economics by Martin Feldstein at Harvard, and he told us that banks and corporations were neutral technocratic institutions. And I believed him, because I was an arrogant Harvard student who trusted economists. Witnessing the policy choice to concentrate wealth and power during the Wall Street bailouts, and talking to lots of people in foreclosure who didn’t get a bailout, broke me of that illusion.

After you learn about Too Big to Fail banks, it’s hard not to look around and begin seeing that Too Big to Fail is everywhere. Eventually I came to read Cornered by Barry Lynn, and that book helped connect the dots and set me on the path to researching my own book, Goliath. (Later I found out Feldstein was on the board of AIG, which was one of the central villains of the financial crisis.)

What’s your story? And what monopolies are you noticing these days?

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