One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and again.
Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.
In the long run, the greatest weapon of mass destruction is stupidity.
The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.
Deception is one of the quickest ways to gain little things and lose big things.
Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like the national interest.
Social Engineering -- The art of replacing what works with what sounds good.
Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.
Since this is an era when many people are concerned about 'fairness' and 'social justice,' what is your 'fair share' of what someone else has worked for?
Neither the depth of despondency nor the height of euphoria tells you how long either will last.
Even when black youth gangs target white strangers on the streets and spew out racial hatred as they batter them and rob them, mayors, police chiefs and the media tiptoe around their racism and many in the media either don't cover these stories or leave out the race and racism involved.
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.
An inmate in a Florida prison wrote to agree with me on the availability of guns, saying that a 'criminal can and will get a stolen gun faster than you can get your car washed.' He also points out that many criminals prefer guns gotten illegally, since they will be harder to trace.
The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy.
People who pride themselves on their complexity and deride others for being simplistic should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.
The freedom of America is the freedom to live your own life and take your own chances.
Systemic processes tend to reward people for making decisions that turn out to be right--creating great resentment among the anointed, who feel themselves entitled to rewards for being articulate, politically active, and morally fervent.
When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.
Any politician who can be elected only by turning Americans against other Americans is too dangerous to be elected.
If you want to see the poor remain poor, generation after generation, just keep the standards low in their schools and make excuses for their academic shortcomings and personal misbehavior. But please don't congratulate yourself on your compassion.
Politeness and consideration for others is like investing pennies and getting dollars back.
People will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right -- especially if events prove you right while proving them wrong.
When you want to help people, you tell them the truth.
Longer Version:
When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
Various mental tests or scholastic tests have been criticized as unfair because different groups perform very differently on such tests. But one reply to critics summarized the issue succinctly: The tests are not unfair. Life is unfair and the tests measure the results.
Actually lowering the cost of insurance would be accomplished by such things as making it harder for lawyers to win frivolous lawsuits against insurance companies.
If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.
The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.
Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today's problems are a result of yesterday's solutions.
Hyperinflation can take virtually your entire life's savings, without the government having to bother raising the official tax rate at all.
Over the generations, black leaders have ranged from noble souls to shameless charlatans.
Just what is it that academics have to fear if they stand up for common decency, instead of letting campus barbarians run amok?
Even if the government spends itself into bankruptcy and the economy still does not recover, Keynesians can always say that it would have worked if only the government had spent more.
As for gun control advocates, I have no hope whatever that any facts whatever will make the slightest dent in their thinking -- or lack of thinking.
Elections should be held on April 16th- the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the few things that might discourage politicians from being big spenders.
You don't send people to prison on the basis of what other people imagine, or on the basis of media sound bites like 'shooting an unarmed child,' when that 'child' was beating him bloody.
Do countries with strong gun control laws have lower murder rates? Only if you cherry-pick the data.
If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.
Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.
Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
Both free speech rights and property rights belong legally to individuals, but their real function is social, to benefit vast numbers of people who do not themselves exercise these rights.
President Obama seems completely unaware of how many of the policies he is trying to impose have been tried before, in many times and places around the world, and have failed time and again.
A shortage is a sign that somebody is keeping the price artificially lower than it would be if supply and demand were allowed to operate freely.
Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.
I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.
The Congressional Budget Office has been embarrassed repeatedly by making projections based on the assumption that tax revenues and tax rates move in the same direction.
Although the big word on the left is 'compassion,' the big agenda on the left is dependency.
Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it.
You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.
People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.
Tariffs that save jobs in the steel industry mean higher steel prices, which in turn means fewer sales of American steel products around the world and losses of far more jobs than are saved.
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.
Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
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.
Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson's administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's brilliant 'whiz kids' tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.
The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
Helping those who have been struck by unforeseeable misfortunes is fundamentally different from making dependency a way of life.
Being willing to donate the taxpayers' money is not the same as being willing to put your own money where your mouth is.
Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.
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.
Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?
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.
Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.
It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
Imagine a political system so radical as to promise to move more of the poorest 20% of the population into the richest 20% than remain in the poorest bracket within the decade? You don't need to imagine it. It's called the United States of America.
There is no question that liberals do an impressive job of expressing concern for blacks. But do the intentions expressed in their words match the actual consequences of their deeds?
Those who cry out that the government should 'do something' never even ask for data on what has actually happened when the government did something, compared to what actually happened when the government did nothing.
The word 'racism' is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything -- and demanding evidence makes you a 'racist.'
Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.
The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.
The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.
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.
All too often when liberals cite statistics, they forget the statisticians' warning that correlation is not causation.
Do all children have some inherent right to live in America if they have done nothing wrong? If not, then why should the children of illegal immigrants have such a right?
The biggest and most deadly 'tax' rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits -- food stamps, housing subsidies and the like -- if their income goes up.
All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should check such beliefs against facts.
The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state.
If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.
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.
Without a moral framework, there is nothing left but immediate self-indulgence by some and the path of least resistance by others. Neither can sustain a free society.
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.
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.
The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens.
The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.
Immigration laws are the only laws that are discussed in terms of how to help people who break them.
In liberal logic, if life is unfair then the answer is to turn more tax money over to politicians, to spend in ways that will increase their chances of getting reelected.
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.
The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers.
Longer Version:
The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers. Think about the things that have improved our lives the most over the past century -- medical advances, the transportation revolution, huge increases in consumer goods, dramatic improvements in housing, the computer. The people who created these things -- the doers -- are not popular heroes. Our heroes are the talkers who complain about the doers.
Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty.
Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.
The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.
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.
The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.