The Wisdom of Thomas Sowell

I listened to an interview of Thomas Sowell, the noted economist, on Fora.tv and was awed by his ability to see through the quackery that abounds in so much of American politics. The interviewer was asking him questions and to comment on his new book "Economic Facts and Fallacies".

One observation by Mr. Sowell that I particularly liked is his answer to the following sentence, which he could not include in his book:

"No book can cover all the utter nonsense that politicians speak in an election year". Mr Sowell goes on to give an example of one of these utter nonsenses.

"The notion that what we cannot afford in terms of medical care for 300 million Americans we can somehow afford by sending it through the government and paying for a government bureaucracy on top of all the other costs of medical care."

The interviewer asks Mr. Sowell if he still felt pessimistic about the future and he answers more so!

He continues: "Let's start with Obama, Hillary and McCain."

This interview is WELL worth a listen to. (Listen here).

Using Your Grandma for Political Gain

As soon as I heard Obama's line that his white grandmother was afraid when she crossed a black man on the streets, I instinctively thought - this just did not ring true. At the time this alleged incident occurred he was living with his white grandmother and his white mother in Hawaii. Hawaii? The state with the most ethnically diverse people? Something's not right in the state of Obama's thoughts.

Thomas Sowell has called Obama's Philadelphia speech "a theatrical masterpiece" and it is surely that. The man is a word smith and a crafter of sentences. But should he be the Presidential nominee for the Democratic party? That's a very important question for the Democrats.

"...Someone once said that a con man's job is not to convince skeptics but to enable people to continue to believe what they already want to believe. Accordingly, Obama's Philadelphia speech -- a theatrical masterpiece -- will probably reassure most Democrats and some other Obama supporters. They will undoubtedly say that we should now "move on," even though many Democrats have still not yet moved on from George W. Bush's 2000 election victory. Like the Soviet show trials during their 1930s purges, Obama's speech was not supposed to convince critics but to reassure supporters and fellow-travelers, in order to keep the "useful idiots" useful."

"Best-selling author Shelby Steele's recent book on Barack Obama ("A Bound Man") has valuable insights into both the man and the circumstances facing many other blacks -- especially those who were never part of the black ghetto culture but who feel a need to identify with it for either personal, political or financial reasons. Like religious converts who become more Catholic than the Pope, such people often become blacker-than-thou. For whatever reason, Barack Obama chose a black extremist church decades ago -- even though there was no shortage of very different churches, both black and white -- in Chicago. Some say that he was trying to earn credibility on the ghetto streets, to facilitate his work as a community activist or for his political career. We may never know why. But now that Barack Obama is running for a presidential nomination, he is doing so on a radically different basis, as a post-racial candidate uniquely prepared to bring us all together..." (READ)