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In one of those typical San Francisco decisions that makes San Francisco a poster child for the liberal left, the city's Board of Supervisors is moving to block a paint store from renting a vacant building once used by a video rental shop. That paint store is part of a chain, and chain stores are not liked by a vocal segment of the local population. Chain stores are already banned from some parts of San Francisco, and at least one member of the Board of Supervisors plans to introduce bans on chain stores in other areas. Chain stores have been...

Let's face it. Supply and demand will never replace "need" and "greed" in political discussions of economic issues. Talking about the "need" for more affordable housing or more affordable medical care is what will get politicians more votes this election year. Voters don't want to hear about impersonal things like supply and demand. They want to hear about how their political heroes will stop the villains from "gouging" them or "exploiting" them with high prices. Moral melodrama is where it's at, politically. Least of all do voters want to hear about the most fundamental reality of economics-- that what everybody...

Some people think that the reason the public misunderstands so many issues is that these issues are too "complex" for most voters. But is that really so? With all the commotion in the media and in politics about the high price of gasoline, is there really some terribly complex explanation? Is there anything complex about the fact that with two countries-- India and China-- having rapid economic growth, and with combined populations 8 times that of the United States, they are creating an increased demand for the world's oil supply? The problem is not that supply and demand is such...

REACHING THE PUBLIC also means that the public reaches you. My mail ranges from fan mail to hate mail. But there is a special kind of letter that bothers me more than the most idiotic obscenities. That is the letter from some teenager (or younger) who is writing because his school has led him to believe that he ought to have opinions on some issue or other -- and ought to express those opinions to strangers he has read about and expect those strangers to take up their time discussing his opinions.

Sometimes unrelated events nevertheless tell a coherent story. One newspaper story that caught my eye recently was about two high-powered schools in South Korea where Korean girls study 15 hours a day, preparing themselves for tests to get into elite colleges in the United States. Harvard, Yale and Princeton already have 34 students from those schools. When a copy of the 50th anniversary report on members of the Harvard class of 1958 arrived in the mail recently, I thought back to one of my fellow students in that class who had worn a hole in the sole of his shoe...

Many years ago, a great hitter named Paul Waner was nearing the end of his long career. He entered a ballgame with 2,999 hits -- one hit away from the landmark total of 3,000, which so many hitters want to reach, but which relatively few actually do reach. Waner hit a ball that the fielder did not handle cleanly but the official scorer called it a hit, making it Waner's 3,000th. Paul Waner then sent word to the official scorer that he did not want that questionable hit to be the one that put him over the top. The official...

Why does college cost so much? There are two basic reasons. The first is that people will pay what the colleges charge. The second is that there is little incentive for colleges to reduce the tuition they charge. Those who want the government to provide subsidies to help meet the high cost of college seem not to consider whether government subsidies might have contributed to the high cost of college in the first place. In any kind of economic transaction, it seldom makes sense to charge prices so high that very few people can afford to pay them. But, with...

Those who argue that the taxpayers should be forced to subsidize people who go to colleges and universities seldom bother to think beyond the notion that education is a Good Thing. Some education is not only a good thing but a great thing. But, like most good things, there are limits to how much of it is good -- and how good compared to other uses of the resources required. In other words, education is not a Good Thing categorically in unlimited amounts, for people of all levels of ability, interest and willingness to work. Nor is there any obvious...

A front-page headline in the New York Times captures much of the economic confusion of our time: "Fewer Options Open to Pay for Costs of College." The whole article is about the increased costs of college, the difficulties parents have in paying those costs, and the difficulties that both students and parents have in trying to borrow the money needed when their current incomes will not cover college costs. All that is fine for a purely "human interest" story. But making economic policies on the basis of human interest stories -- which is what politicians increasingly do, especially in election...

The latest political crusade is the crusade to replace ordinary light bulbs with the new CFL light bulb that is supposed to save electricity, reducing the need for fossil fuels and helping the fight against global warming. Since crusaders seldom stop to weigh the cost of what they are advocating, it is especially important that the rest of us do so before we get swept along by rhetoric and emotions. With the CFL light bulb, the initial cost -- several times that of a regular light bulb -- is only the financial cost. A bigger problem is what to do...

An e-mail from a reader said that, while Hillary Clinton tells lies, Barack Obama is himself a lie. That is becoming painfully apparent with each new revelation of how drastically his carefully crafted image this election year contrasts with what he has actually been saying and doing for many years. Senator Obama's election year image is that of a man who can bring the country together, overcoming differences of party or race, as well as solving our international problems by talking with Iran and other countries with which we are at odds, and performing other miscellaneous miracles as needed. There...

If Senator John McCain needed to prove that he is a real Republican, he did it when he continued an old Republican tradition of utterly inept attempts to appeal to black voters. Senator McCain was booed at a recent memorial on the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. In typical Republican fashion, he tried to apologize but the audience was not buying it and let him know it. Why would Senator McCain choose a venue where his rejection was virtually guaranteed? Not only did he not get his message out, the message that came out through the...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: Most of the problems of this country are not nearly as bad as the "solutions" -- especially the solutions that politicians come up with during election years. Some people actually think that televising Congress gives us information. What it really does is give politicians millions of dollars worth of free advertising, while they play charades on camera to fool the rest of us. Alfred E. Neuman of Mad magazine said: "What, me worry?" During election years, Democrats running for office say: "What, me liberal?" Senator John McCain could never convince me to vote for...

There was a real irony in the recent intervention by the Federal Reserve System to provide the money that enabled the firm of JPMorgan Chase to buy Bear Stearns before it went bankrupt. The point was to try to prevent a domino effect of panic in the financial markets that could lead to a downturn in the economy. The irony is that it was almost exactly a hundred years ago -- 1907, to be exact -- that the original J.P. Morgan arranged a bailout of a troubled financial institution for the same purpose of preventing a panic that could end...

Leaders of the Democratic Party and much of the media are wringing their hands over what to do about Democratic voters in Florida and Michigan, in order not to leave them out of the process of picking a nominee, and perhaps alienating them as for as the general election in November is concerned. Like so many things that politicians do that end up in a tangled mess, the current rules and practices may have been things that "seemed like a good idea at the time." There might be a lesson there about not getting carried away with rhetoric, and about...

It is painful to watch defenders of Barack Obama tying themselves into knots trying to evade the obvious. Some are saying that Senator Obama cannot be held responsible for what his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, said. In their version of events, Barack Obama just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—and a bunch of mean-spirited people are trying to make something out of it. It makes a good story, but it won’t stand up under scrutiny.

Did Senator Barack Obama's speech in Philadelphia convince people that he is still a viable candidate to be President of the United States, despite the adverse reactions to statements by his pastor, Jeremiah Wright? The polls and the primaries will answer that question. The great unasked question for Senator Obama is the question that was asked about President Nixon during the Watergate scandal; What did he know and when did he know it? Although Senator Obama would now have us believe that he is shocked, shocked, at what Jeremiah Wright said, that he was not in the church when pastor...

Did Senator Barack Obama’s speech in Philadelphia convince people that he is still a viable candidate to be President of the United States, despite the adverse reactions to statements by his pastor, Jeremiah Wright? The polls and the primaries will answer that question.

There is something both poignant and galling about the candidacy of Barack Obama. Any American, regardless of party or race, has to find it heartening that the country has reached the point where a black candidate for President of the United States sweeps so many primaries in states where the overwhelming majority of the population is white. We have all seen the crowds enthralled by Barack Obama's rhetoric and theatrical style. Many of his supporters put their money where their mouths were, so that this recently arrived Senator received more millions of dollars in donations than candidates who have been...

Thomas Sowell: Criminals belong behind bars Liberals ignore potential costs and risks when suggesting 'alternatives' Thursday, March 13, 2008 For more than two centuries, the political left has been preoccupied with the fate of criminals, often while ignoring or playing down the fate of the victims of those criminals. So it is hardly surprising that a recent New York Times editorial has returned to a familiar theme among those on the left, on both sides of the Atlantic, with its lament that "incarceration rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen." Liberals seemed to find it puzzling that...

<p>That was the first question that came to mind when the story of New York governor Eliot Spitzer's involvement with a prostitution ring was reported in the media.</p> <p>It was also the first question that came to mind when star quarterback Michael Vick ruined his career and lost his freedom over his involvement in illegal dog fighting.</p>

What was he thinking of? That was the first question that came to mind when the story of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's involvement with a prostitution ring was reported in the media. It was also the first question that came to mind when star quarterback Michael Vick ruined his career and lost his freedom over his involvement in illegal dog fighting. It is a question that arises when other very fortunate people risk everything for some trivial satisfaction. Many in the media refer to Eliot Spitzer as some moral hero who fell from grace. Spitzer was never a moral...

For more than two centuries, the political left has been preoccupied with the fate of criminals, often while ignoring or downplaying the fate of the victims of those criminals. So it is hardly surprising that a recent New York Times editorial has returned to a familiar theme among those on the left, on both sides of the Atlantic, with its lament that "incarceration rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen." Back in 1997, New York Times writer Fox Butterfield expressed the same lament under the headline, "Crime Keeps on Falling, But Prisons Keep on Filling." Then, as...

Sowell on Economic Facts and Fallacies February 25, 2008, Featuring Thomas Sowell Thomas Sowell of Stanford University's Hoover Institution talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the ideas in his new book, Economic Facts and Fallacies. He discusses the misleading nature of measured income inequality, CEO pay, why nations grow or stay poor, the role of intellectuals and experts in designing public policy, and immigration.

Writing in 1954, Lionel Trilling said that most conservatives do not “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

Writing in 1954, Lionel Trilling said that most conservatives do not "express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." One of the perks of being a liberal is disdaining people who are not liberals. However, as of 1954, Trilling's dismissive attitude toward conservatives' intellectual landscape was painfully close to the truth. Trilling wrote ten years after Friedrich Hayek's landmark counterattack against the left in his book "The Road to Serfdom." But that was a book with great impact on a relatively small number of people at the time, though its...

It is fascinating watching politicians say how they are going to rescue the "rust belt" regions where jobs are disappearing and companies are either shutting down or moving elsewhere. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is being blamed for the jobs going elsewhere. Barack Obama blames the Clinton administration for NAFTA, and that includes Hillary Clinton. Senator Obama says that he is for free trade, provided it is "fair trade." That is election year rhetoric at its cleverest. Since "fair" is one of those words that can mean virtually anything to anybody, what this amounts to is that politicians...

It has almost become something of a joke when some "global warming" conference has to be cancelled because of a snowstorm or bitterly cold weather. But stampedes and hysteria are no joke -- and creating stampedes and hysteria has become a major activity of those hyping a global warming "crisis." They mobilize like-minded people from a variety of occupations, call them all "scientists" and then claim that "all" the experts agree on a global warming crisis. Their biggest argument is that there is no argument. A whole cottage industry has sprung up among people who get grants, government agencies who...

People on the left often use other countries as examples of things that we should do. If other countries have a government-run medical system, then we should have one too, they say. If other countries control prices, then we should control prices — or so the reasoning goes. Almost never is there any suggestion that we should first find out whether the actual results of the policies we are supposed to imitate are better or worse than what we already have. There is in fact a lot that we can learn from other countries if we look at the actual...

The front page of the New York Times has increasingly become the home of editorials disguised as "news" stories. Too often it has become the home of hoaxes. Going back some years, it was the Tawana Brawley hoax that she had been gang-raped by a bunch of white men. Just a couple of years ago, it was the Duke University "rape" hoax that they fell for. In between there were the various hoaxes of New York Times reporter Jason Blair, who was kept on and promoted until too many people found out what he had been doing and the paper...

The Berkeley city council has made national news by telling Marine Corps recruiters that they are unwelcome in that bastion of the academic left. It is a shame that Berkeley is not on some island in the South Pacific, because then they could be given their independence and left to defend themselves. As it is, members of our armed forces who put their lives on the line to defend America are also defending people like too many in Berkeley for whom the very word America, and the American flag, bring only sneers. Unfortunately, Berkeley is not unique. A professor at...

Those who put a high value on words may recoil at the title of Jonah Goldberg's new book, "Liberal Fascism." As a result, they may refuse to read it, which will be their loss — and a major loss. Those who value substance over words, however, will find in this book a wealth of challenging insights, backed up by thorough research and brilliant analysis. This is the sort of book that challenges the fundamental assumptions of its time — and which, for that reason, is likely to be shunned rather than criticized. Because the word "fascist" is often thrown around...

Even before Mitt Romney bowed out — with class, by the way — supporters of John McCain, and Republican party pooh-bahs in general, were chastising those conservatives in the media who had criticized Senator McCain. Those who leveled their attacks at Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other conservatives who had criticized McCain's record completely misconceived the role of the media. Journalists do not exist to get one party's candidates elected or otherwise serve one party's political interests. The public are the journalists' clientele. It is the public that reads newspapers and magazines, that listens to radio or watches television. They...

Wednesday, February 6, 2008 The other day, a reader e-mailed me to ask for an explanation of the gold standard. He had heard it advocated in one of the political speeches. Any responsible answer to his question would have taken more time than I could spare, but I looked through several introductory economics textbooks -- including my own, "Basic Economics" -- to try to find something that I could recommend that he read. Unfortunately, none of them covered the gold standard in any great detail. Since then, however, I have gotten around to reading a recently published book titled "The...

The front-runners in both political parties — that is, Hillary Clinton and John McCain — are making "experience" their big talking point. But what kind of "experience"? Both have been around in politics for decades. But just what did they accomplish — and how did it benefit the country? Whether in Arkansas or in Washington, Hillary Clinton has spent decades parlaying her husband's political clout into both money and power. How did that benefit anybody but the Clintons? For those people whose memories are short, go on the Internet and look up Whitewater, the confidential raw FBI files on hundreds...

February 1, 2008 We have been hearing for years that Senator John McCain gives "straight talk" and his bus has been endlessly referred to as the "straight talk express." But endless repetition does not make something true. The fact that McCain makes short, blunt statements does not make him a straight-talker. There are short, blunt lies -- and he told a big one on the eve of the Florida primary, when he claimed that Mitt Romney had advocated a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. Even the Washington Post, which supports McCain, said that the Senator "has distorted the meaning" of...

When 89% of the people in the media voted for Bill Clinton in the last election, how are the Republicans supposed to get their message out to the public, unless they pay the millions of dollars it takes to advertise on television? Why Media Love McCain Republicans have no choice but to outspend the Democrats, because Democrats get a lot of their message out through the media, free of charge, simply because the people in the media believe so much of that message themselves. Restricting spending does not mean a public better informed about both sides of issues. It means...

DP: One of the clearest thinkers, and for me, folks, that’s a big compliment, in America, Tom Sowell is my guest. Economic Facts And Fallacies, about race, about male/female, about what’s happening in urban centers, and we’re going to go through each of them. Today is the primary in Florida, and I suspect you’re not going to give me an answer to this, and that’s all right, but I’m going to ask it to you anyway. Is there anybody, at least from an economics perspective, that you like? TS: Oh, I guess Romney knows more about the economy, apparently, than...

Both political parties seem determined that the federal government should create a "stimulus package" of things designed to cushion a downturn in the economy. That alone should be enough to make us remember that "the devil is always in the details," because things that are bipartisan are often twice as bad as things that are partisan. A bipartisan intervention is virtually guaranteed to be a grab bag of inconsistent policies thrown together in order to get the votes of people with contradictory ideas of what ought to be done. The idea of a stimulus package is based on the general...

Whatever one may think about Barack Obama as a candidate or as a potential President, his candidacy has brought something new to the American political scene. His stunning victory in the Iowa caucuses, in a state where more than 90 percent of the population is white, was an unmistakable signal that racism is not the invincible thing that some seem to think it is. Unlike Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton before him, Obama has not been running as a black candidate for symbolic purposes but as a serious contender who happens to be black. Into this upbeat national scene Bill...

McCain's AgeBy Thomas SowellThursday, January 24, 2008 Among the painful signs of our time are the shocked reactions to Chuck Norris' raising the question of whether Senator John McCain is too old to be president. Have we reached the point where we have so many politically correct taboos that we can't even talk sense? Does a man in his seventies have less energy for either physical or mental tasks than someone younger? Those of us who are in our seventies know darn well that we can't do everything we used to do, as well as we used to do it....

Wednesday, January 23, 2008 Everybody expects politicians to lie, especially during an election year. You can bet the rent money on it. Among the many lies we can expect to hear this election year, none will be bigger or more often repeated, in the media as well as by politicians, than the lie that there is a widening income gap between the rich and the poor. Why is that a lie, when there are so many statistics that seem to substantiate it? Let's start at square one and take it a step at a time. First of all, there is...

Most of the horrors of the 20th century — of which there were many — would not have been possible without demagoguery or misleading propaganda. Most people have too much of a sense of decency and too much common sense to have gone along with those horrors unless someone found a way to turn off their thinking and turn on their emotions. That is how Jim Jones led hundreds of people to their deaths at Jonestown. On a much larger scale, that is how Lenin created a regime of mass murder in Russia, how Hitler did the same thing in...

It is becoming increasingly and painfully clear that voters in both parties are having a hard time settling on a front-runner. Not only have different people won different primaries, but also no one won a majority in any primary in either party — until Hil-lary Clinton, running virtually unopposed in the Michigan primary, received just over half the votes, while "uncommitted" received 40%. What is wrong with this year's candidates? The short answer is that most of the Republicans are questionable and all three leading Democrats are dangerous. The only real conservative candidate is former Sen. Fred Thompson, but his...

<p>It is becoming increasingly and painfully clear that voters in both parties are having a hard time settling on a front runner.</p> <p>Not only have different people won different primaries thus far, no one won a majority in any primary in either party -- until Hillary Clinton, running virtually unopposed in the Michigan primary, received just over half the votes, while "uncommitted" received 40 percent.</p>

It was front-page news on the January 14th issue of the San Francisco Chronicle that blacks by the tens of thousands have left the San Francisco Bay area since the 1990 census. Since my book "Applied Economics" analyzed this situation a few years ago, it was nice to see that the information has finally reached the San Francisco Chronicle, though they have yet to explain the politics and the economics behind the exodus. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is not peculiar to the San Francisco Bay Area and blacks are not the only group being forced out of upscale liberal communities in...

January 9, 2008 This 40th anniversary of the turbulent year 1968 is already starting to spawn nostalgic accounts of that year. We can look for more during this year in articles, books, and TV specials, featuring aging 1960s radicals seeking to relive their youth. The events of 1968 have continuing implications for our times but not the implications drawn by those with romantic myths about 1968 and about themselves. The first of the shocks of 1968 was the sudden eruption of violent attacks by Communist guerillas in the cities of South Vietnam, known as the "Tet offensive," after a local...

"The question of what kind of President each candidate would make is infinitely more important than all the "horse race" handicapping that dominates the media. By far the best presentation as a candidate, among all the candidates in both parties, is that of Barack Obama. But if he actually believes even half of the irresponsible nonsense he talks, he would be an utter disaster in the White House. Among the Democrats, the choice between John Edwards and Barack Obama depends on whether you prefer glib demagoguery in its plain vanilla form or spiced with a little style and color. The...

Tuesday, January 8, 2008 It was not that long ago that the big political question was how Rudolph Giuliani would do against Hillary Clinton in the November election. The Iowa caucus votes have made that question sound like ancient history, if not science fiction. The results of the Iowa caucus are only a small part of the story of this election year but their implications are significant. One implication that reaches well beyond politics is that a state that is 95 percent white gave its biggest vote total to a black man. More Iowa women voted for Obama than for...

Senator Hillary Clinton's Christmas commercial, showing various government programs as presents under a Christmas tree, was a classic example of calculated confusion in politics. Anyone who believes that the government can give the country presents has fallen for the oldest political illusion of all -- the illusion of something for nothing. Santa Claus may turn out to be the real front-runner in the primaries, judging by the way candidates are vying with one another to give away government goodies to the voters. Santa Claus is bipartisan. The Bush administration is unveiling its plan to rescue people who gambled and lost...