Neither "property" nor the value of property is a physical thing. Property is a set of defined options...It is that set of options which has economic value...It is the options, and not the physical things, which are the "property" - economically as well as legally...But because the public tends to think of property as tangible, physical things, this opens the way politically for government confiscation of property by forcibly taking away options while leaving the physical objects untouched.


Thomas Sowell

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Physical Invasion

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The most basic question is not what is best but who shall decide what is best.
THOMAS SOWELL
Policies are judged by their consequences, but crusades are judged by how good they make the crusade...
THOMAS SOWELL
The most basic inherent constraint is that neither time nor wisdom are free goods available in unlim...
THOMAS SOWELL
Informal relationships are not mere minor interstitial supplements to the major institutions of soci...
THOMAS SOWELL
Implicit in the activist conception of government is the assumption that you can take the good thing...
THOMAS SOWELL
Social values in general are incrementally variable: neither safety, diversity, rational articulatio...
THOMAS SOWELL
Knowledge can be enormously costly, and is often scattered in widely uneven fragments, too small to ...
THOMAS SOWELL
The stricter standards and independent, often conclusive, evidence in the physical sciences cannot b...
THOMAS SOWELL
Civilization is an enormous device for economizing knowledge,.
THOMAS SOWELL
Many of the products which create a modern standard of living are only the physical incorporations o...
THOMAS SOWELL
The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those wh...
THOMAS SOWELL
What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human...
THOMAS SOWELL
Many bad policies are simply good policies taken too far.
THOMAS SOWELL
One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression...
THOMAS SOWELL
The assumption that spending more of the taxpayer's money will make things better has survived all k...
THOMAS SOWELL
No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: ...
THOMAS SOWELL
Envy plus rhetoric equals "social justice.".
THOMAS SOWELL
Force is the antithesis of freedom, but force must be used, if only to defend against other force.
THOMAS SOWELL
Freedom...refer[s] to a social relationship among people- namely, the absence of force as a prospect...
THOMAS SOWELL
The celebration of unbounded individualism means, beyond some point, the acceptance of force- either...
THOMAS SOWELL
Given that some social processes must convey inherent constraints, the choice is among various mixtu...
THOMAS SOWELL
Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.
THOMAS SOWELL
To include freedom in the very definition of democracy is to define a process not by its actual char...
THOMAS SOWELL
To say that a farm boy knows how to milk a cow is to say that we can send him out to the barn with a...
THOMAS SOWELL
It is precisely those things which belong to "the people" which have historically been despoiled- wi...
THOMAS SOWELL
What is politically defined as economic "planning" is the forcible superseding of other people's pla...
THOMAS SOWELL
Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of ...
THOMAS SOWELL
As a rule of thumb, Congressional legislation that is bipartisan is usually twice as bad as legislat...
THOMAS SOWELL
The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best
THOMAS SOWELL
Given that some social processes must convey inherent constraints, the choice is among various mixtu...
THOMAS SOWELL
Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be ...
THOMAS SOWELL
The staunchest conservatives advocate a range of changes which differ in specifics, rather than in n...
THOMAS SOWELL
I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to...
THOMAS SOWELL
One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causa...
THOMAS SOWELL
It takes no more research than a trip to almost any public library or college to show the incredibly...
THOMAS SOWELL
the so-called ‘Negro dialect’ is simply a variation on the ordinary Southern accent.
THOMAS SOWELL
Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hen...
THOMAS SOWELL
However much history may be invoked in support of these policies (affirmative action), no pol...
THOMAS SOWELL
Reality does not go away when it is ignored.
THOMAS SOWELL