Historical slavery

Both secular and religious philosophers going back to Plato had seen the mundane physical world as being far less important than the ideal or spiritual world, so that being right and free in one’s mind was more important than one’s fate in the physical world. Dissipating one’s energies trying to reform the practices of a sinful world was considered less important than bringing one’s own soul into line with spiritual imperatives. However, as a humanistic philosophy began to affect both secular and religious thought, what happened in the mundane physical world began to assume greater importance than it had before in the eyes of intellectuals, philosophers, and religious leaders. Religious minorities, such as the Quakers or the Evangelicals within the Anglican Church, could not simply rely on religious tradition and authority because their very existence was based on a questioning of, and in some cases a break with, those traditions and authorities. These insurgents had to think independently about slavery, as about other things, and derive their own conclusions. The rising class of secular intellectuals in the West could even less rely on the authority of established religious institutions. This did not mean that either secular or religious insurgents were automatically anti-slavery. What it meant was that they both had to evolve some intellectually and morally defensible position because they could not simply base themselves on existing beliefs or practices. Different individuals resolved the issues differently but out of this process came some who began to see slavery as an intolerable evil. 

—Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals

Eurocentric slavery

Often it is those who are most critical of a “Eurocentric” view of the world who are most Eurocentric when it comes to the evils and failings of the human race. Why would anyone wish to arbitrarily understate an evil that plagued mankind for thousands of years, unless it was not this evil itself that was the real concern, but rather the present-day uses of that historic evil? Clearly, the ability to score ideological points against American society or Western civilization, or to induce guilt and thereby extract benefits from the white population today, are greatly enhanced by making enslavement appear to be a peculiarly American, or a peculiarly white, crime. 

—Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals

Wages as an incentive

An economy is not a moral seminar, authorized to hand out badges of merit to deserving people. An economy is a mechanism for generating the material wealth on which the standard of living of millions of people depends. Pay is not a retrospective reward for merit, but a prospecting incentive for contributing to production. 

—Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies.

Taking sides

One of the most chilling lessons of the history of the twentieth century is how deceptive domestic tranquility can be, when it takes only the right circumstances and the right demagogue to turn neighbor murderously against neighbor. Besides Nazi Germany, in Sri Lanka, in Indonesia, in the Balkans, and in sub-Saharan Africa, ethnic polarization and strife were stirred up by either fanatics or opportunists. Both “sides” [inevitably] lost—and they lost because they became sides, instead of remaining fellow countrymen with different cultures. 

—Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals p290.

Intellectual Authority

In many ways this episode illustrates far more general characteristics of intellectual-political "relevance": (1) the casual ease with which vast expansions of the amount and scope of government power were called for by intellectuals to be used against their fellow citizens and fellow human beings, for purposes of implementing the intellectuals' vision, (2) the automatic presumption that differences between the current views of the relevant intellectuals ("experts") and the views of others reflect only the misguided ignorance of the latter, who are to be either "educated," dismissed, or discredited, rather than being argued with directly in terms of cognitive substance (that is, the intellectual process was involved primarily in giving one side sufficient reputation not to have to engage in it with non-"experts"), (3) the confidence with which predictions were made, without reference to any prior record of correct predictions nor to any monitoring processes to confirm the future validity of current predictions, (4) the moral as well as intellectual superiority that accompanied the implicit faith that the current views of the "experts" represented the objective, inescapable conclusions of scientific evidence and logic, and their direct applicability for the public good, rather than either the vogues or the professional self-interest of these "experts," and (5) a focus on determining the most likely alternative conclusions rather than whether any of the conclusions had sufficient basis to go beyond tentative cognitive results to sweeping policy prescription. It illustrates a general characteristic of socially and politically "relevant" intellectual activity—an unwillingness or inability to say, "we don't know," or even to admit that conclusions are tentative. Such admissions would be wholly consonant with intellectual processes but not with the interests of intellectuals as a social class. Politicians often proceed as if intellectuals have no self-interests involved but act solely on cognitive bases or in the policy interest of society at large. —Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions, 1980, writing of the American eugenics of the 1920s.

Decision-making

Imposing outsiders' rules to supersede insiders' understanding and flexibility is inefficient use of knowledge. The Supreme Court rejected a prescreening panel that would have reduced its work load. According to justice Brennan, "flexibility would be lost" in an "inherently subjective" process with "intangible factors" that are "more a matter of 'feel' than of precisely ascertainable facts," and which involve a "delicate interplay" of "discretionary forces." The tragedy is that he apparently considered this to be an institutional peculiarity of the Supreme Court, rather than a pervasive fact of decision making in general. Because this is what the Court has done to other institutions across the country. Constitutional guarantees encumber the State precisely so that the State may not encumber the citizen. —Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions

Mafia

"If you could say one thing to the ruling politicians, what would it be?" "One word: Goodbye. Because I know there's no point in talking to them. It's like asking what I would say to the head of the mafia to get him to give up crime." —Thomas Sowell

Intellectual Discussion

Much intellectual discussion of the decisions of businessmen proceeds as if employers, landlords, and others operating under the systemic pressures of the marketplace are free to make arbitrary and capricious decisions based on prejudice and misinformation—as if they were intellectuals sitting around a seminar table—and pay no price for being mistaken. —Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed, Chap VII, p 188.

Power and Preemption

Power and preemption are the touchstones of the vision of the anointed, however much that vision is described in terms of the beneficent goals it is seeking. —Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed.

Modern monetary theory

MMT isn't new. From the first coin debasement through the Keynesian myths, "politicians have unceasingly recommended more deficit spending in order to cure or reduce existing unemployment ... systematically diverting attention from the real causes of our unemployment ... government economic interventions." —Henry Hazlitt, 1978.