Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 402 of the 2016 second edition of Thomas Sowell’s important volume Wealth, Poverty and Politics:

Because the redistributionists’ argument is presented as a moral imperative for an affluent society to see that everyone has “basic necessities” – however defined – their proposal often escapes empirical tests of what such policies actually produce, compared to what is produced by policies based on the thesis that “challenging and response” spurs human achievement. The many examples of social degeneration in the wake of the all-encompassing welfare state, in both England and America, might have painfully sobering implications, if so many advocates of the welfare state were not still ignoring painful social consequences, while basking in the glow of a sense of moral superiority.