Our Eye Candy du Jour: links to relatively recent books from Thomas Sowell which I've read since the blog opened in 2005. Click, if you wish, to go to my corresponding report.
And (trust me on this) I read a bunch more pre-2005. I've been a Sowell fan ever since reading his Knowledge and Decisions back in the 1980s. I have slightly over 16 inches of shelf space holding his older books.
The Hoover Institution recently held an event entitled "The Sowell Legacy: Ideas, Impact, And Intellectual Freedom" and some participants posted about it. First up: David R. Henderson, with Two Personal Characteristics of Thomas Sowell.
David also remarks on Sowell's talent for "pithy quotes". Here are his favorites:
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.
It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.
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 first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
If you don’t believe in the innate unreasonableness of human beings, just try raising children.
It doesn’t matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.
Another participant, Wilfred Reilly, provided his thoughts at National Review: What Thomas Sowell Sees — and Sees Through. (archive.today link)
Excerpt, reporting on one of Wilfred's favorite Sowell works (and mine), The Vision of the Anointed:
In it, he explores the idea that different political factions are motivated by very different understandings of human nature, his “culturalist” position that such mundane differences between population groups as average age and rate of study time explain variations in their performance better than either “oppression” or genes alone, and the related “never be univariate” idea that raw comparisons between (say) blacks and whites are worthless without statistical adjustment for the well-known differences between such populations. Sowell even dedicates a full chapter to his contempt for contemporary statistical trickery, which he lards with amusing descriptions of common mathematical dodges.
The Vision of the Anointed opens with one of Sowell’s more enduring contributions to the social scientific and public intellectual literature: his discussion of what exactly the “vision of the anointed” is compared with the rival “tragic,” or “constrained,” vision of human nature. Citing thinkers from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Nicolas de Condorcet to Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith, he argues that there has long been an intellectual contest between these two views of humanity, each of which he attempts to define.
I'll close with Don Boudreaux's Quotation of the Day..., taken from The Thomas Sowell Reader. It's particularly appropriate for these days, when Democrats have shut down the government over their demands for (approximately) $1.5 trillion in additional spending.
Guess who that ghost is gonna visit when the bill comes due?
Also of note:
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Unfortunately, Trump's not shutting down his government. Reason editor Katherine Mangu-Ward on what's ruining what could have been a libertarian vacay: The president has too many 'emergency' powers.
The emergency is now the default. Most of the knobs and levers a modern president uses to bully companies, police speech, or move bodies around aren't new laws—they're standby powers that switch on with a magic word: emergency. Congress littered the U.S. Code with these shortcuts; the Brennan Center for Justice has cataloged 137 statutory powers that spring to life the moment a president declares one. (Many never fully turn off.) As of mid-2025, there were roughly 50 simultaneous national emergencies still in force; they are renewed annually, spanning everything from sanctions to tariffs. That architecture lets the White House reach for trade controls, financial blockades, and tech blacklists without returning to Congress. If you like your powers separated, this is the opposite.
I still want Congress to do its job on spending: legislate clearly, spend less, and claw back delegations it never should've handed over to the executive branch. The remedy isn't complicated, but it is hard to execute. Congress must take back its rightful powers, narrow emergency authorities, sunset delegations, and relearn the civic discipline of saying "no" to our own would-be redeemers, even when they're on our own team. Kudos to a few senators, Rand Paul (R–Ky.) among them, who in early October tried to take back the power to declare war after the Trump administration made several unauthorized strikes on alleged Venezuelan drug smugglers. (Alas, the vote failed 48 to 51.)
If you're curious, it was (mostly) a party-line vote.
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Or see their Nazi tats. Nate Silver has some deep thoughts: Everybody loves “outsider” candidates. Until they find their Reddit posts.
I don’t personally take offense easily, and I’m not sure that I have any interest in weighing in on precisely which of Platner’s past actions you ought to find unforgivably offensive given his self-description as a “retired shitposter”. Indeed, I find myself with some contradictory impulses.
On the one hand, I don’t think we should expect people to self-police their social media postings in case they might one day run for political office.
On the other hand, this isn’t really a matter of cancellation: nobody is saying that, for instance, Platner’s oyster farm should be taken away from him. Rather, Democrats have to choose exactly one from among the roughly 1 million Mainers who are at least 30 years old and U.S. citizens, and therefore eligible to run against Susan Collins in a race that could hardly be more vital to their chances of retaking the U.S. Senate in 2026. (Or more likely, 2028.)
I’m also not sure what to make of Platner’s redemption arc. He’s been more “authentic”-seeming than your typical politician in interviews, but “authenticity” itself can be performative. Was there a little too much tryhard when Platner told The Advocate that his views of gay people began to change when he “attended showtunes night at JR’s,” a Washington, D.C. gay bar? That itself is a little stereotypical; I’m a gay guy who would be happy enough never to hear another showtune again. Or when Platner wrote in a Reddit AMA that he’d “stand right in the fucking way of anyone who’s going to try to come after the freedoms of the LGBTQIA+ community”, is that authentic, or is that overcompensating?
Nate cheers for the D team, so take that into account.
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Not getting their rightful share of abuse. Kevin D. Williamson says Congress Owns This Debt Crisis. (archive.today link)
KDW aims his fire at…
This week’s meeting of the Committee to Horse-Whip Mike Johnson will now come to order.
New business?
I can think of 50 good reasons to flog Mike Johnson, the dishonorable little lickspittle who supposedly serves as speaker of the House but whose main function in this earthly life is being a knee-walking sycophant and self-abasing enabler of Donald Trump—and No. 1 on the list of reasons to have him horse-whipped right now is this: $1 trillion in new debt in just two months, a headlong rush into national financial ruination not matched since the orgy of COVID spending.
We talk about presidents and deficits all the time, and that is a mistake—although it is worth keeping in mind that Trump, as president, was perfectly contented with that recklessly incontinent COVID spending he and other Republicans signed off on. You’ll recall that Trump insisted that his own name appear on the relief checks, as though he were doing Americans a personal favor by bribing them with their own money. Trump has never lifted one stumpy little pinkie finger to rein in the deficit.
But the real fiscal malefactor is Congress—and that means, for the moment, Mike Johnson. Our Constitution gives the House of Representatives the sole power of introducing taxing and spending bills, and Johnson leads a Republican majority in that chamber—at least, that is the job he is supposed to be doing when he is not polishing Trump’s wingtips with his tongue.
Reader, can I get an Eeeyu!
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