Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens.
Thomas SowellRead
We don‘t have faith that #freedom works. We have evidence.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes that the effectiveness of freedom is not based on belief but on observable evidence.
Thomas Sowell's quote highlights the importance of empirical evidence in understanding the concept of freedom. Unlike faith, which is based on belief without proof, evidence provides a concrete foundation for recognizing the benefits and functionalities of freedom in society. It encourages individuals to rely on data and real-world outcomes rather than mere belief when assessing the merits of freedom.
Themes
FreedomEvidenceFaithSocietyEmpirical
In practice
Example use cases
In a debate about government policies, one might refer to this quote to highlight the importance of evidence in supporting claims about freedom.
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All quotes →Blacks were not enslaved because they were black but because they were available. Slavery has existed in the world for thousands of years. Whites enslaved other whites in Europe for centuries before the first black was brought to the Western hemisphere. Asians enslaved Europeans. Asians enslaved other Asians. Africans enslaved other Africans, and indeed even today in North Africa, blacks continue to enslave blacks.
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One of the reasons for conspiracy theories is an assumption that people in high places always know what they are doing. When they do something that makes no sense, devious reasons are imagined by conspiracy theorists, when in fact it may be due to plain old ignorance and incompetence.
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You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.
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The real problem, both in discussions of mass shootings and in discussions of gun control, is that too many people are too committed to a vision to allow mere facts to interfere with their beliefs, and the sense of superiority that those beliefs give them.
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Why is history important? Without history, many people have no idea how many of today's half-baked ideas have been tried, again and again - and have repeatedly led to disaster. Most of these ideas are not new. They are just being recycled with re-treaded rhetoric.
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Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It's the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me.
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As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe.
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The complexity of the connection between the world of perception and the world of physics does not preclude that such a connection can be shown to exist at any time.
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In fact, death seems to have been a rather late invention in evolution. One can go a long way in evolution before encountering an authentic corpse.
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