Two Columns from Thomas Sowell

I went out for a walk this afternoon and it started to rain heavily.  I had to retreat home but not after being in the deluge for ten minutes.  Thankfully, the wife just laughed at me when I got home.

So I went online.  And yes!  Thomas Sowell had 2 columns.

The first is Random thoughts on the passing scene.  I will list a few choice quotes from it:

Barack Obama is the newest face on the political scene, expressing some of the oldest notions. Virtually everything he says is vintage 1960s rhetoric, as if he has learned nothing from the many disasters that 1960s notions have led to in the decades since then.

 

Wise people created civilization over the centuries and clever people are dismantling it today. You can see it happening just by channel surfing on TV or hear it in rap music or read it in the pompous nonsense of academics and judges.

 

Despite people who speak glibly of "earlier and simpler times," all that makes earlier times seem simpler is our ignorance of their complexities.

 

One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people's motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans-- anything except reason.

 

For the last quote, I can think of the Chickenhawk argument, No war for Oil, Bush lied People Died, Bush equals Hitler, ad nauseam.

Sowell, today, also published a column about Health Care.   Here is a quote that is relevant to the Canadian situation and drugs:

People who are urging us to follow other countries that control the prices of medications seem uninterested in the fact that those countries depend on the United States to create new drugs, after they destroyed incentives to do so in their own countries.

Canada makes these cheap generic drugs and looks like a good guy for doing so even though it was American Pharmaceutical Research that created this drugs in the first place.  Supporters of this policy defend it by saying it is only reducing the profit of big corporations.  And they go on to say that Canada's medical system is better than America's.  America unfortunately can't imitate the Canadian model because if it did it would not have a neighbor with which it could leach technology and expertise.  Canada's medical system needs the American system to sustain.  Just like the Socialist agriculture system of the Soviet Union needed Capitalist countries to make up for its shortage of food.