“Tax the rich” backfires for a very simple reason: the rich don’t just stand still to be sheared like sheep. If we keep raising taxes on wealthy business owners, they will simply choose to do more and more of their businesses in other countries. They will make new investments and keep their profits abroad instead of back home. The jobs that are created in the process will be created overseas. The people who ultimately bear the cost are ordinary citizens looking for a job and small businesses that cannot easily move abroad.

“Nowadays, almost anything that anybody wants is called a ‘right’—a magic word that does away with the need for evidence, logic, or even common sense.” Sowell’s point rests on a basic distinction: does a right require others to leave you free, or require others to give you things? The former protects your liberty. The latter makes a claim on other people’s labor, property, or resources. Once every desirable outcome is called a “right,” that distinction disappears. The word can then be used to bypass questions of scarcity, costs, and trade-offs. But those realities do not disappear: resources remain scarce, costs still have to be paid, and trade-offs still have to be made.

Sowell reminds us that Barack Obama has long been associated with radical activists who do not believe in America’s fundamental principles. Obama’s politics revolve around stoking grievances, mobilizing groups around them, and using that pressure to push his agenda.

“What the welfare system and other kinds of governmental programs are doing is paying people to fail. In so far as they fail, they receive the money. In so far as they succeed, even to a moderate extent, the money is taken away.” — Thomas Sowell

You can’t make housing more affordable while limiting how much housing can be built. If supply is restricted and demand keeps rising, prices will rise.

The underlying reason is that many on the left think they are morally superior and know better than everyone else. So they assume that anyone who disagrees with them must be bigoted, ignorant, or both.

“The Marxians’ love of democratic institutions was a stratagem only, a pious fraud for the deception of the masses. Within a socialist community there is no room left for freedom.” — Ludwig von Mises

“Just as you don’t find eagles living in the ocean or fish living on mountain tops, so you don’t find leftists concentrated where their ideas have to stand the test of performance.” — Thomas Sowell

“Tax the rich” advocates claim that the wealthy are not paying their “fair share.” Yet the U.S. has a progressive tax system in which higher earners pay a larger share of their income in taxes. They are technically paying more than their “fair share.” High-income Americans also pay the vast majority of federal income taxes. The top 10% of earners pay over 70% of the total, and the top 50% account for around 97%. The top 1% alone pay more than 38%.

“Some of the most vocal critics of the way things are being done are people who have done nothing themselves, and whose only contributions to society are their complaints and moral exhibitionism.” — Thomas Sowell

“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.” Thomas Sowell is drawing a distinction between caring about a goal and agreeing on how to achieve it. Opposing a government program intended to reduce poverty, for example, does not mean opposing help for the poor; it may simply reflect a disagreement over whether that program will actually work. People can care about the same problem while disagreeing completely on the best way to address it. Sowell’s point is that policies should be judged by their results, not by the compassion of their supporters or the motives attributed to their critics.

Leftist ideas don’t work, so they are most common in places where they don’t have to work to survive. Think academia and Hollywood.

“The barbarians are not at the gates. They are inside the gates—and have academic tenure, judicial appointments, government grants, and control of the movies, television, and other media.” — Thomas Sowell

The term “climate change deniers” is misleading, Sowell argues, because most people who are given that label do not deny that the climate changes. Rather, they question whether the effects are truly catastrophic enough to justify immediate measures that would upend the global economy and affect the lives of billions of people. “The next time someone talks about ‘climate change deniers,’” Sowell writes, “ask them to name one—and tell you just where specifically you can find their words, declaring that climates do not change.” “You can bet the rent money that they cannot tell you.” Those so-called “climate change deniers,” Sowell continues, consist of “meteorologists and other scientists who refuse to join the stampede toward drastic economic changes to prevent what others say will be catastrophic levels of ‘global warming.’”

Thomas Sowell on the real reason collectivists denigrate individual responsibility and invoke social justice: “Personal responsibility is a real problem for those who want to collectivize society and take away our power to make our own decisions, transferring that power to third parties like themselves, who imagine themselves to be so much wiser and nobler than the rest of us.”

“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.” Thomas Sowell wrote this in 2000 about schools and courts pushing parents to medicate their kids with Ritalin, a drug for ADHD. Sowell’s concern was that the people applying that pressure bore little of the cost if they were wrong. The consequences would fall instead on the child and the family. The underlying problem Sowell identifies is much broader: politicians, administrators, and intellectuals can all advocate policies that affect millions of people while bearing little, if any, personal cost when those policies fail. When decision-makers bear the consequences of being wrong, they have stronger incentives to weigh risks carefully, learn from mistakes, and change course. When the costs of bad decisions fall primarily on other people, the same mistakes can be made again and again.

It’s difficult to reason people out of beliefs they were not reasoned into in the first place. That helps explain why mountains of empirical evidence do not seem to change AOC’s mind in the slightest.

“Many of the words and phrases used in the media and among academics suggest that things simply happen to people, rather than being caused by their own choices or behavior.” — Thomas Sowell

What struck Sowell about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) was not simply her politics, but her blatant disregard for facts. “There seems to be no factual issue as far as she is concerned. She just pronounces things to be so and that’s the end of it.”