read something interesting for a change... learn something
In Wealth, Poverty, and Politics, Dr. Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, examines the reasons for large differences in income and wealth between nations and among groups within nations. A wide range of geographic, demographic, cultural, and political factors are examined, not to find a single factor or a single combination of factors that will explain all economic differences, but to show how particular combinations of factors limit or expand the possibilities for specific nations and peoples at specific times and places.
https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Povert...6920a83550e99f
Wall Street Journal
?In his latest tome, [Sowell] draws from this well of research to do what he has done so well for so long: question basic assumptions behind public policy and follow the facts where they lead him.?
Washington Times
?A calmly phrased but damning indictment of perhaps the world's most rhetorical blunt political instrument: class hatred.?
life is hard for all of us when you blow hards run on about useless bullshit like it's real, while the real stuff is ignored.
'It is by no means obvious why we should prefer trying to equalize incomes to putting our efforts into increasing output. People in general and the poor in particular seem to ?vote with their feet? by moving to where there is greater prosperity, rather than where there is greater economic equality.
Rising standards of living, especially for those at the bottom economically, have resulted not so much from changing the relative sizes of different slices of the economic pie, as from increasing the size of the pie itself ? which has largely been accomplished without requiring heavy rhetoric, fierce emotions, or bloodshed.
Does it not matter if the hungry are fed, if slums are replaced by decent and air-conditioned housing, if infant mortality rates are reduced to less than a tenth of what they were before? Are invidious ?gaps? and ?disparities? all that matter?
In a world where we are all beneficiaries of enormous windfall gains that our forbearers never had, are we to tear the society that created all this apart because some people?s windfall gains are greater or less than some other people?s windfall gains?'