It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
Meaning of the quote
This quote is saying that it's unwise to let people make important decisions if they don't have to face the consequences of being wrong. When people don't have to deal with the results of their choices, they can make bad decisions without any penalty. That can be really harmful and foolish. The person who said this believes it's important for decision-makers to be accountable for their actions.
About Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell is an acclaimed American economist, social philosopher, and political commentator. He has authored over 45 books and is known for his conservative and libertarian views. Sowell overcame a challenging upbringing to become a prominent voice in the American conservative movement and a recipient of the National Humanities Medal.
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What ‘multiculturalism’ boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture – and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.
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Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.
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What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.
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It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
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Liberals seem to assume that, if you don’t believe in their particular political solutions, then you don’t really care about the people that they claim to want to help.
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Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.
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It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
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The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.
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There are only two ways of telling the complete truth – anonymously and posthumously.
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Like a baseball game, wars are not over till they are over. Wars don’t run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them.
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Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
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Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.
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The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.
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Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.
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People who identify themselves as conservatives donate money to charity more often than people who identify themselves as liberals. They donate more money and a higher percentage of their incomes.
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People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.
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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.
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One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring.
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The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers.
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It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.
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If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.
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One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.
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The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.
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If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.
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The real minimum wage is zero.
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There are few things more dishonorable than misleading the young.
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Too much of what is called “education” is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.
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