Quotes and insights from Thomas Sowell and other economists. Clear thinking on economics, liberty, and real-world trade-offs.

Joined July 2025
Capitalist Vision retweeted
When you use diff-in-diff with staggered treatment to see if demand curves slope down
1
5
1
70
3,741
China ended extreme poverty. Citizens of the USA are returning to extreme poverty. And please note, that this is just the World Bank definition. China's definition also includes "Two no worries" meaning no worries about food and clothing, and "three guarantees" meaning compulsory education, basic medical care, and housing security are guaranteed. There is much the USA can learn from China's model.
72
Socialists like to claim that the rich are obsessed with hoarding money and wealth, but it is the socialists who are obsessed with staking a claim to the rich's wealth.
128
"...redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the state."~Bertrand de Jouvenel
1
131
Capitalist Vision retweeted
Dismantling USAID Hasn't Killed Anyone According to liberals, we have a MORAL DUTY to go into debt to give money to people in need all over the Earth, and if we don’t, we’re RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR DEATHS. But, we are not the only country in the world, so if they need medicine in Kenya or food in Haiti and people are dying because they don’t have it, why isn’t someone else doing it? How about the people that live there? What about their governments? How about China or Russia? What about the EU? What does the United Nations do? How about NGOs? Billionaires? If liberals are so upset about it, why doesn’t someone like Bernie Sanders or AOC encourage donors to chip into fund that can be used for this? Why is the United States EXPECTED TO GO INTO FURTHER DEBT to pay for this? Oh, that’s right. The Left really cares about USAID because it was used to fund liberal NGOs, act as a jobs program for the Left, promote socialist values and get taxpayer dollars cycled back into Democratic political organizations. So, they blame us for deaths halfway around the world that have nothing to do with us to scam more money out of the American people to use to fill their coffers. What it all comes down to is that our country is $39 trillion in debt, and doling out money to charity is something only countries running in the black should be doing if there’s no benefit to it. Could you make a case for it after some rare, particularly heart-rending disaster? Sure, maybe. But it makes no sense to borrow money to give away to other nations in return for nothing, year after year. We should have stopped doing that decades ago.
The dismantling of USAID has already ensued in roughly 600,000 deaths, about 400,000 of them children, in poor nations abroad, according to Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols. The toll is expected to rise as health infrastructure that became reliant on Western support deteriorates, resulting in deaths that may take months or years to register. Follow: @AFpost
72
23
11
108
152,739
What does it make a person who wants to govern not by reason and rule of law but by passion, envy, and hatred?
Carrying water for billionaires makes you a loser, I’m sorry.
1
126
"Funneling" is the wrong word. Wealth in a market economy emerges through voluntary exchange, where both consumer surplus and producer surplus increase simultaneously.
Sure. To solve global poverty we need to funnel more wealth upwards to the likes of Musk. Makes total sense.
1
1
78
"While to the Nazi the communist, and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits who are made of the right timber...they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom."~Hayek
65
"We must hate - hatred is the basis for communism...Children must be taught to hate their parents if they are not communists."~Lenin
33
Bernie Sanders' logic taken to its logical extreme: All businesses use public roads that were created by all of us. Therefore, at any time the Priesthood of Class Warfare decides, it can appropriate any business's property.
35
"The replacement of human muscle by machine power, and the growing importance of industries and occupations not dependent on either, have made sex differences and age differences no longer as significant as they had once been."~Thomas Sowell
106
"The view that the utilization of a fortune, no matter what size, is solely the private affair of the individual requires to be corrected...in the National Socialist state...without the contribution of the community, no individual would... enjoy such an advantage." —Hitler (1936)
Fine. Just as long as they acknowledge that much of what made them rich came from public goods and public investment. That gives them a moral obligation to pay significant taxes.
105
By 1920, Lenin's secret police (Cheka) was executing people on a mass scale during the Red Terror, with estimates suggesting hundreds to thousands of deaths per month.
49
A monkey hoarding bananas is not the same as an entrepreneur creating value. One takes from a pile; the other enlarges it. If that distinction is unclear, that may be the real thing worth studying.
If a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat, while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to figure out what was wrong with it. When humans do it, we put them on the cover of Forbes.
67
Hasan Piker is another in a long line of privileged, wealthy sociopaths who want to run your life: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Pol Pot, Mao, Trotsky, Castro, Guevara, Mamdani, and Abimael Guzmán.
98
"For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire."~Will Durant
97
"We will not open or operate retail stores in California... California has created one of the most overregulated, expensive, and risky environments for businesses in America."~Marcus Lemonis, Executive Chairman of Bed Bath & Beyond
132
"Egalitarians create the most dangerous inequality of all—inequality of power. Allowing politicians to determine what all other human beings will be allowed to earn is one of the most reckless gambles imaginable."— Thomas Sowell #Sowell #inequality #ThomasSowell
128
"Expecting government to promote "fairness" is just giving politicians more arbitrary power."~Thomas Sowell
91
"most blacks had become better educated and had lifted themselves out of poverty at a rate higher than after the civil rights revolution of the 1960s."~Thomas Sowell
72