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… is from page 228 of Thomas Sowell’s Compassion Versus Guilt, a 1987 collection of some of his popular essays; specifically, it’s from Sowell’s December 10th, 1985, column titled “By the Numbers”:

When intellectuals discover that the world does not behave according to their theories, the conclusion they invariably draw is that the world must be changed. It must be awfully hard to change theories.

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… is from page 22 of Thomas Sowell’s Compassion Versus Guilt, a 1987 collection of some of his popular essays; specifically, it’s from Sowell’s March 1st, 1985, column titled “The Wonderful World of ‘Solutions’”:

Trade-offs are not good enough for the morally anointed. There must be solutions.

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Here’s a slightly modified version of a letter that I sent eleven days ago to the Washington Post – a letter not published there.

Editor:

Nearly all that you write about the effect of U.S. tariffs on China is correct and crucial (“Are U.S. tariffs on China working? Look at the evidence.” December 15). But you err when you describe China’s trade surplus as “evidence of its industrial overcapacity.” China might well have industrial overcapacity, but a country’s trade surplus isn’t necessarily evidence of such. A trade surplus could instead reflect the relative attractiveness to a country’s citizens of investing abroad rather than in their own country. The resulting net outflow of capital (which is the mirror image of a trade surplus) reflects, not necessarily industrial overcapacity but, rather, much better investment opportunities abroad.

It’s worth noting that if China does indeed have industrial overcapacity, that’s a problem for China but a boon to the rest of the world. We get a greater abundance of goods for our consumption and inputs for use in our own production facilities – all subsidized by the Chinese people.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

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… is from page 401 of The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011):

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.

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Scrooge was never mistreated by his nephew, by Cratchit, or by those seeking charitable donations. Scrooge was always free to refuse them all.

The economic doctrine of “externalities” has become an excuse for governments to intervene economically in heavy-handed ways, all in the name of “saving” the environment.