Happy birthday Thomas Sowell

 Happy 96th birthday to Professor Thomas Sowell, one of the greatest thinkers of our time.

"Thomas Sowell is 96 years old, and the man has spent seven of those decades teaching the same lesson the political class refuses to learn: there are no solutions, only trade-offs. 

"He started as a Marxist. Worked in the federal government in 1960, studying minimum wage policy in Puerto Rico. The data told him what the textbooks would not: when you raise the price of labor by law, you price the least-skilled workers out of a job. His government colleagues cared more about protecting the programme than protecting the workers. That killed his faith in central planning faster than any theory. 

"Read 'Knowledge and Decisions' (1980) and you get the whole architecture of his thought. Prices carry information. No planner in Washington, however credentialed, can gather what millions of buyers and sellers signal every second through their bids and refusals. Hayek made this point in his 1945 paper on the use of knowledge in society. Sowell took it and built an entire method around it, applying it to housing, education, race, crime, and the endless parade of 'compassionate' schemes that reliably wreck the people they claim to rescue. Rent control empties buildings. Occupational licensing locks the poor out of trades. Sowell documented every one of these disasters with numbers, not slogans. 

"You want the sharpest example? Look at his work on race and economics. He showed that black Americans made faster gains in employment and income in the decades before the great expansion of the welfare state than after it. The programs sold as help became a ceiling. He said it plainly when saying it plainly cost him invitations to every respectable dinner party in the country. He never flinched. He wrote another column instead and another book, well into his nineties. 

"This man never mistook good intentions for good results. Go read him. You will emerge harder to fool."

~ Handre