Carolina QuotesActivism is a way for useless people to feel important.
Thomas Sowell Carolinian
Source
Random Thoughts, Feb 26, 2004
- year
- 2004
Cite this record
“Activism is a way for useless people to feel important.” Thomas Sowell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-ACC122D27B. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/acc122d27b
More from Thomas Sowell
In the summer of 1959, as in the summer of 1957, I worked as a clerk-typist in the headquarters of the U.S. Public Health Service in Washington. The people I worked for were very nice and I grew to like them. One day, a man had a heart attack at around 5 PM, on the sidewalk outside the Public Health Service. He was taken inside to the nurse's room, where he was asked if he was a government employee. If he were, he would have been eligible to be taken to a medical facility there. Unfortunately, he was not, so a phone call was made to a local hospital to send an ambulance. By the time this ambulance made its way through miles of Washington rush-hour traffic, the man was dead. He died waiting for a doctor, in a building full of doctors. Nothing so dramatized for me the nature of a bureaucracy and its emphasis on procedures, rather than results.
The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
One of the grand fallacies of our time is that something beneficial should be subsidized.