A Quote by Thomas Sowell
You cannot subsidize irresponsibility and expect people to become more responsible.
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Apparently the only people who are supposed to be responsible are the taxpayers - and they are increasingly made responsible for other people's irresponsibility.
This is absolutely bizarre that we continue to subsidize highways beyond the gasoline tax, airlines, and we don't subsidize, we don't want to subsidize a national rail system that has environmental impact.
Rather than subsidize 'American' exporters, it makes more sense to subsidize any global company - to the extent it's adding to its exports from the United States.
I do not expect NASA to go out and build settlements and colonies. I do not expect them to give SpaceX all the money needed to colonize Mars. I do not expect them to realize the future of humanity is contingent on harvesting the wealth of the solar system overnight and suddenly subsidize my asteroid mining project.
A house divided against itself cannot stand." I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.
John von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of von Neumann's advice. It's made me a very happy man ever since. But it was von Neumann who put the seed in that grew into my active irresponsibility!
One of the problems is that the US government supports unhealthy food and does very little to support healthy food. I mean, we subsidize high fructose corn syrup. We subsidize hydrogenated corn oil. We do not subsidize organic food. We subsidize four crops that are the building blocks of fast food. And you also have to work on access. We have food deserts in our cities. We know that the distance you live from a supplier of fresh produce is one of the best predictors of your health.
The more normal it gets for people to see people of a gender or skin tone they wouldn't expect in jobs that they wouldn't expect, or speaking a way they wouldn't expect them to, the more it cultivates a sense that we share more than separates us.
If only we could realize that our purpose is to be caretakers. We are responsible for leading our flock to the place where the grass is green, but it is up to them to eat! We cannot be responsible for how much they digest. We cannot make people mature.
Bizarrely, I actually feel safer the older I get, like people will expect less from me, and I can become more and more invisible, yet more and more eccentric.
In the early 1970s, Milton Friedman argued that corporations should not be socially responsible because they had no mandate to be; they existed to make money, not to be charitable institutions. But in the economy of the 21st century, corporations cannot be socially responsible, if social responsibility is understood to mean sacrificing profits for the sake of some perceived social good. That's because competition has become so much more intense.
Irresponsibility breeds irresponsibility. The finances of government are so central. You'd think that would be pretty obvious.
It borders on irresponsibility when people get on television and start talking that way when they should know better. They should do their homework, and they should report in a responsible manner. Unfortunately, it's a very competitive business, the business we're in, and there is a perception that by hyping up this threat, you draw people's attention.
Trees and soils can absorb carbon dioxide released by fossil fuel burning. It would be great to subsidize responsible farmers and forest managers.
One cannot control the actions of others, but we are responsible for what we do. People say things such as, "I can't do this," "it is not really me," "this makes me uncomfortable," etc. People, simply put, opt out of playing the game or doing so in a way that will make them successful. So get over yourself, and do what you need to do - and what, by the way, others around you are doing, to become more powerful.
We live in a welfare state society - one that is already bloated and overburdened. We cannot continue to absorb and support an endless stream of people who will inevitably need legal residents to subsidize their lives.
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