“While facts are important, understanding the implications of those facts is even more important, and that is what an understanding of economics seeks to provide.” — Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell https://a.co/c2RMrvC

“As the distinguished British historian Paul Johnson put it: The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.{” — Basic Economics by #ThomasSowell https://a.co/dd6mFGP

“The importance of economic principles extends beyond things that most people think of as economics. For example, those who worry about the exhaustion of petroleum, iron ore, or other natural resources often assume that they are discussing the amount of physical stuff on the planet. But that assumption changes radically when you realize that statistics on “known reserves” of these resources may tell us more about costs of exploration, and about the interest rate on the money that finances this exploration, than about how much of the resource remains on Earth. Nor is the amount of physical stuff necessarily what matters, without knowing how much of it can be extracted and processed at what costs.” — Basic Economics by #ThomasSowell https://a.co/g3dtCBi

“Much confusion comes from judging economic policies by the goals they proclaim rather than the incentives they create. In wartime, for example, when military forces absorb many resources that would normally go into producing civilian products, there is often an understandable desire to ensure that such basic things as food continue to be available to the civilian population, especially those with low incomes. Thus price controls may be imposed on bread and butter, but not on champagne and caviar. However right this might seem, when you look only at the goal or the initial consequences, the picture changes drastically when you follow the subsequent repercussions from the incentives created. If the prices of bread and butter are kept lower than they would be if determined by supply and demand in a free market, then producers of bread and butter tend to end up with lower rates of profit than producers of champagne and caviar, who remain free to charge “whatever the traffic will bear,” since no one regards these things as essential. However, because all producers compete for labor and other scarce resources, this means that the higher profits from champagne and caviar enable their producers to bid away more resources, at the expense of producers of bread and butter, than they would have been able to in a free market without price controls. Shifting resources from the production of bread and butter to the production of champagne and caviar is one of the repercussions that escapes notice when we fail to think beyond the initial stage of consequences of economic policies. For similar reasons, rent control tends to shift resources from the production of ordinary housing for moderate-income people toward the building of luxury housing for the affluent and wealthy.” — Basic Economics by #ThomasSowell https://a.co/6SGQDvz

“Whatever its origins or its ability to influence or be influenced by external events, economics is ultimately a study of an enduring part of the human condition. Its value depends on its contribution to our understanding of a particular set of conditions involving the allocation of scarce resources which have alternative uses. Unfortunately, little of the knowledge and understanding within the economics profession has reached the average citizen and voter, leaving politicians free to do things that would never be tolerated if most people understood economics as well as Alfred Marshall understood it a century ago or David Ricardo two centuries ago.” — Basic Economics by #ThomasSowell https://a.co/dlfqrka

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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.