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“Both in the private sector and in the government sector, there are always values that some people think worthy enough that other people should have to pay for them—but not worthy enough that they should have to pay for them themselves. Nowhere is the weighing of some values against other values obscured more often by rhetoric than when discussing government policies. Taxing away what other people have earned, in order to finance one’s own moral adventures via social programs, is often depicted as a humanitarian endeavor. But allowing others the same freedom and dignity as oneself, so that they can make their own choices with their own earnings, is considered to be pandering to “greed.” Greed for power is no less dangerous than greed for money, and has historically shed far more blood in the process.” — Basic Economics by #ThomasSowell https://a.co/7vUA9Fs

“Politics allows people to vote for the impossible, which may be one reason why politicians are often more popular than economists, who keep reminding people that there is no free lunch and that there are no “solutions” but only trade-offs. In the real world that people live in, and are likely to live in for centuries to come, trade-offs are inescapable. Even if we refuse to make a choice, circumstances will make choices for us, as we run out of resources for many important things that we could have had, if only we had taken the trouble to weigh alternatives.” — Basic Economics by #ThomasSowell https://a.co/2QKx5Uk

“A long-standing staple of political rhetoric has been the attempt to keep the prices of housing, medical care, or other goods and services “reasonable” or “affordable.” But to say that prices should be reasonable or affordable is to say that economic realities have to adjust to our budget, or to what we are willing to pay, because we are not going to adjust to the realities. Yet the amount of resources required to manufacture and transport the things we want are wholly independent of what we are willing or able to pay. It is completely unreasonable to expect reasonable prices. Price controls can of course be imposed by government but we have already seen in Chapter 3 what the consequences are. Subsidies can also be used to keep prices down, but that does not change the costs of producing goods and services in the slightest. It just means that part of those costs are paid in taxes.” — Basic Economics by #ThomasSowell https://a.co/fVfTlkA

“Taking into account both discernible geographic, cultural and other patterns that present either wide or narrow opportunities for different peoples in different places and times, and unpredictable happenstances that can disrupt existing patterns of life or even change the course of history, suggests that neither equality of economic outcomes nor the indefinite persistence of a particular pattern of inequalities can be assumed. What the centuries ahead will be like, no one can know. But much may depend on how well the many peoples and their leaders around the world understand what factors promote economic growth and what factors impede it.” — Basic Economics by #ThomasSowell https://a.co/2R1Q2ib

Human Capital “Physical wealth may be highly visible, but human capital, invisible inside people’s heads, is often more crucial to the long-run prosperity of a nation or a people. John Stuart Mill used this fact to explain why nations often recover, with surprising speed, from the physical devastations of war: “What the enemy have destroyed, would have been destroyed in a little time by the inhabitants themselves” in the normal course of their consumption, and would require replenishing. Given the wear and tear on capital equipment, constant reproduction of new equipment would likewise be required.{ 901} What the war does not destroy is the human capital that created the physical capital in the first place.” — Basic Economics by #ThomasSowell https://a.co/iZ23qUk

“Agriculture—perhaps the most life-changing innovation in the history of the human species—came to Europe from the Middle East in ancient times, so that Europeans who happened to be located in the eastern Mediterranean, closer to the Middle East, received this epoch-making advance, moving them beyond the era of hunter-gatherers, centuries before those Europeans living in northern Europe. Agriculture greatly reduced the amount of land required to provide food to sustain a given number of people, and thus made cities possible.” — Basic Economics by #ThomasSowell https://a.co/d8F3gCR

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Juneteenth is coming. Here are some facts. Don’t trust, verify. President Lincoln issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, which stated that slaves in states still in rebellion as of January 1, 1863, would be declared free. One hundred days later, with the rebellion unabated, President issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious areas "are, and henceforward shall be free." It applied only to states that had seceded from the Union, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. It also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy that had already come under Union control. After January 1, 1863, every advance of Federal troops expanded the domain of freedom. The Proclamation announced the acceptance of black men into the Union Army and Navy, enabling the liberated to become liberators. By the end of the war, almost 200,000 black soldiers and sailors had fought for the Union and freedom.

“Forty-six percent of the publicly held bonds issued by the U.S. government are held by people in other countries.” — Basic Economics by #ThomasSowell https://a.co/7tTI0Mv Office of Management and Budget, Analytical Perspectives:  Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2013 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 2012), pp. 81, 82. This seems to be in contrast to what Avik Roy states in his National Affairs article. If you haven’t read Avik’s article I highly recommend it!

Bitcoin and the U.S. Fiscal Reckoning

Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin have few fans in Washington, but thanks to increasing worries over the long-term stability of the dollar, they have p...

“Those who decry the numbers of jobs transferred to another country almost never state whether these are net losses of jobs. While many American jobs have been “outsourced” to India and other countries, many other countries “outsource” jobs to the United States. The German company Siemens employs tens of thousands of Americans in the United States and so do Japanese automakers Honda and Toyota. As of 2006, 63 percent of the Japanese brand automobiles sold in the United States were manufactured in the United States.{ 771} The total number of Americans employed by foreign multinational companies runs into the millions.” — Basic Economics by #ThomasSowell https://a.co/1RzHp5F

“Even more effective disguises for international trade restrictions are health and safety rules applied to imports—rules which often go far beyond what is necessary for either health or safety. Mere red tape requirements can also grow to the point where the time needed to comply adds enough costs to be prohibitive, especially for perishable imports. If it takes a week to get your strawberries through customs, you may as well not ship them. All these measures, which have been engaged in by countries around the world, share with import quotas the political advantage that it is hard to quantify precisely their effect on consumer prices, however large that effect may be.” — Basic Economics by #ThomasSowell https://a.co/00mRs9f

The High-Wage Fallacy “In a prosperous country such as the United States, a fallacy that sounds very plausible is that American goods cannot compete with goods produced by low-wage workers in poorer countries, some of whom are paid a fraction of what American workers receive. But, plausible as this may sound, both history and economics refute it. Historically, high-wage countries have been exporting to low-wage countries for centuries. The Dutch Republic was a leader in international trade for nearly a century and a half—from the 1590s to the 1740s—while having some of the highest-paid workers in the world.{ 751} Britain was the world’s greatest exporter in the nineteenth century and its wage rates were much higher than the wage rates in many, if not most, of the countries to which it sold its goods.” — Basic Economics by #ThomasSowell https://a.co/cTq3Q31

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