Garbanzo Toons

He's written things like:

“No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: "But what would you replace it with?" When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with”

and

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.”

and especially

“One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain”

He's also written many books over the years. I've read eleven of them. He also writes a regular column that shows up at Townhall.com and at The Jewish World Review. His last two are must reads, Magic Numbers in Politics, Part I and Part II. They are the kind of things that I should forward to all of my liberal friends.

Back in the days of the Soviet Union, two Russian economists who had never lived in a country with a free market economy understood something about market economies that many others who have lived in such economies all their lives have never understood. Nikolai Shmelev and Vladimir Popov said: "Everything is interconnected in the world of prices, so that the smallest change in one element is passed along the chain to millions of others."

What does that mean? It means that a huge increase in the demand for ice cream can mean higher prices for catchers' mitts, among other things.

When more cows are needed to produce more milk to make ice cream, then fewer cows will be slaughtered and that means less cowhide available to make baseball gloves. Supply and demand mean that catchers' mitts are going to cost more.

So, another way to improve education in America, (besides that phonics stuff that I'm always going on about) is to have Sowell as part of the curriculum. He should be required reading for students and teachers, and every blowhard who professes to hate Capitalism, but has no understanding of what Capitalism is, how it works, why it is preferable to Socialism and Communism, and why those systems have never worked without massive amounts of government coercion.

The truly progressive won't listen of course, but there are a fair number of people who, not being progressive sooooooooper geniuses, would.