Thomas Sowell’s thoughts on the welfare state

Thomas Sowell is a brilliant economist and social theorist currently a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Sowell has been one of the modern-day’s big advocates against the social welfare state or its expansion thereof. On that topic, he has spoken and written extensively on the unfounded presence of the welfare state that keeps on expanding.

Here are some of his quotes that do sum up the illogical nature of the welfare state:

The assumption that spending more of taxpayer’s money will make things better has survived all kinds of evidence that it has made things worse.

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.

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.

It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.

Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on “income distribution,” the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.

The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better.

Since this is an era when many people are concerned about ‘fairness’ and ‘social justice,’ what is your ‘fair share’ of what someone else has worked for?

If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else’s expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves.

The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people’s money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.