Could someone please tell me what the hell happened to Thomas Sowell? I turn my head for a few minutes, and while I'm not looking the man turns from one of America's most interesting and insightful thinkers to mindless warbot. (Though, to be fair, he does continue to produce some worthwhile material mixed with the dreck.) Perhaps I shouldn't be shocked- he's hardly the only person to lose his mind after 9/11- but I had always considered Sowell to be several cuts above the Horowitz's and Boortz's of the world.
This depresses the hell out of me, because Sowell was essential to my early political development, especially with the books The Vision of the Anointed and The Quest for Cosmic Justice. Indeed, with the possible exception of Hayek, there is probably no one else who was more important in making me a libertarian. It's awful to see him reduced to this. It's like finding out that the girl you were in love with in high school has gained two hundred pounds and developed an interest in facial scarification.
1 comment:
I've wondered about the same thing. It may be that he's gone the Krugman route and is just expressing the views that he can get paid the most to express.
Or he may believe that unlike agriculture, power production, poverty relief, industrialization, economic development, natural resource management, etc., security really is best accomplished through a large, expensive and intrusive central planning apparatus which demands that citizens submit themselves to the perceived good of the collective.
I'm not sure which of these possibilities is less bad.
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