Thomas Sowell is the man who initially got my feet set in the right direction towards liberty and away from statism through his book, Basic Economics. His article today, available at LRC here, has the most awesome quote I've seen in a long time:
Elites may have more brilliance, but those who make decisions for society as a whole cannot possibly have as much experience as the millions of people whose decisions they preempt. The education and intellects of the elites may lead them to have more sweeping presumptions, but that just makes them more dangerous to the freedom, as well as the well-being, of the people as a whole.
Wow!
I've found that this approach does work with leftists. Central planners have just 24 hours in a day, like the rest of us. How can Ben Bernanke possibly know enough to centrally plan the interest rate on money used by billions of people every day? In other words, in one 8-hour work day, Bernanke (let's throw in all his pals at the Fed for fun) plans the interest rate that will affect the decisions made in billions of person-hours in the same period of time. It makes no sense. No wonder the eugenicist, sociopathic statists want to limit the global population to 500 mil.
Clayton -
Yeah I think Sowell's absolutely terrific. I actually think his best book is A Conflict of Visions but I admit I haven't read everything he's ever written (something like 17 books.)
Sowell like Walter Williams are great economists and great proponents of human freedom. I doubt that they are as freedom oriented as the Austrians are.
The similarities between Williams and Sowell are uncanny.
Both have come to very similar conclusions on many matters completely independently, with many of William's views having been formed from living in a Whites Only neighbourhood in South Africa and Sowell's from his life in black neighbourhoods between upscale and downscale areas.
They both say that laws demanding discrimination will inevitably be disobeyed, because cost of discrimination is greater than cost of not hiring workers of other races, while laws prohibiting discrimination have existed in times of far less social mobility for lagging groups than in times when they were discriminated.