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21 " The next time you see a bum leaving drug needles in a park where children play or urinating in the street, you are seeing your tax dollars at work and the end result of the vision of the anointed. "
― Thomas Sowell , The Thomas Sowell Reader
22 " The federal government could make a Rolls Royce affordable for every American, but we would not be a richer country as a result. We would in fact be a much poorer country, because of all the vast resources transferred from other economic activities to subsidize an extravagant luxury. [...] To have politicians arbitrarily change the price tags, so that prices no longer represent the real costs, is to defeat the whole purpose [of an economy: to make trade-offs, with the prices of a market economy representing the costs of producing things].Reality doesn't change when the government changes price tags. Talk about "bringing down health care costs" is not aimed at the costly legal environment in which medical science operates, or other sources of needless medical costs. It is aimed at price control, which hides costs rather than reducing them. [...]Whether in France during the 1790s, the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik revolution, or in newly independent African nations during the past generation, governments have imposed artificially low prices on food. In each case, this led to artificially low supplies of food and artificially high levels of hunger.People who complain about the "prohibitive" cost of housing, or of going to college, for example, fail to understand that the whole point of costs is to be prohibitive. [...] The idea [that "basic necessities" should be a "right"] certainly sounds nice. But the very fact that we can seriously entertain such a notion, as if we were God on the first day of creation, instead of mortals constrained by the universe we find in place, shows the utter unreality of failing to understand that we can only make choices among alternatives actually available.[...] Trade-offs [as opposed to solutions] remain inescapable, whether they are made through a market or through politics. The difference is that price tags present all the trade-offs simultaneously, while political 'affordability' policies arbitrarily fix on whatever is hot at the moment. That is why cities have been financing all kinds of boondoggles for years, while their bridges rusted and the roadways crumbled. "
23 " our brightest kids have been going downhill even faster than our average kids. "
24 " The people I feel sorry for are those who insist on continuing to do what they have always done but want the results to be different from what they have always been. "
25 " No small part of the existing problems of the public schools is that the school day is already so long and boring, with so little to challenge the ablest students. Moreover, many average and below-average students who have lost all interest are retained by compulsory attendance laws for years past the point where their presence is accomplishing anything other than providing jobs for educators. "
26 " The idea that students can determine relevance in advance is one of the many counterproductive notions to come out of the 1960s. "
27 " Far from using their intellectual skills to clarify the distinction between statistical categories and flesh-and-blood human beings, the intelligentsia have instead used their verbal virtuosity to equate the changing numerical relationship between statistical categories over time with a changing relationship between flesh-and-blood human beings (“the rich” and “the poor”) over time, even though data that follow individual income-earners over time tell a diametrically opposite story from that of data which follow the statistical categories which people are moving into and out of over time. "
28 " To say that merit may be the same is not to say that productivity is the same. Nor can we logically or morally ignore the discrepancy in the relative urgency of those who want their shoes repaired versus those in need of brain surgery. In other words, it is not a question of simply weighing the interest of one income recipient versus the interest of another income recipient, while ignoring the vastly larger number of other people whose well-being depends on what these individuals produce. If "