When Sowell dies, I will know how the Greeks felt when Aristotle died.

This man is a national treasure.

Has he ever written anything that wasn't perfectly worded and eminently quotable?

The English language is deeply honored and grateful to have people who can use it with such elegant and terse clarity as Sowell.

indoctrinated, not educated

Thomas Sowell is walking, talking proof that blacks are not class victims. He was brought up at a time when schools instructed young minds how to think, not what to think. Students in public schools today can only learn what they are taught and tragically it's too often Marxist ideology that leaves them totally unprepared for anything other than carrying anti-American signs and chanting in protest marches. How much better would our country be had he been elected President instead of Barry O?

I am not formally educated and of (barely) above average success level. I feel that the odd fortune I have of being "uneducated" is my super power, because I always feel the need to seek answers instead of having the false confidence of thinking I already have the answers.

I believe it was Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick where Universities had been cordoned by the military and barb-wire.

School "teaches" you to blindly and obediently accept whatever information an "authority figure" tells you as true without doing any kind of investigation on your own. Unfortunately, these so called "authority figures" are putting out information that has little to no relationship with the real world, as a result people who really took the whole schooling thing to heart are becoming crazier and utterly divorced from reality -- ignorant.

PSSST.... We're a Constitutional Republic, not a fucking democracy.

In democracy we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated.

Why do we have to fear the uneducated in "democracy?" Because a "democracy" has a Ruler. In the case of an actual Democracy (which we have never experienced) it is Mob Rule. This is the main idea behind Socialism. Socialism and Democracy are the same exact word in their purest form (the ideal).

The idea is that the will of the majority can determine the laws that will guide us, and if we are all educated enough, the consensus will pick the best choice. If it turns out the best choice wasn't made, we will only have to deal with it until consensus changes and we, as a group, decide new laws. This seems reasonable, but in practice it contains some problems. First is that The Mob is guided by propaganda. That can't be helped, it's just how it is. In a slightly different, albeit related way, consensus can be manufactured through other trickery, so "consensus" isn't generally organic, even in the "educated". But it is the third problem that is far the greater; that is the exact same flaw of all governments we have ever known. The fraud of false claims on Jurisdiction.

Every Ruler, whether it be a Dictator, President, King, the Mob, or "an educated proletariat" (in the ideal case) has, in all of our actual experiences, claimed the Right to dictate what the individual can do in their domain.

Each Individual has a Jurisdiction, a domain over which they are the Ultimate Authority. That Jurisdiction is themselves (by Natural Law), and in any reasonable society, their property. Each Ruler has laid claim to tell people what they can or can't do within that Jurisdiction. THIS is why we must fear the "uneducated." Because the design of the system gives them power over Our Jurisdiction.

This is the key to understanding the fraud that has been perpetrated on our world. Every system makes this same claim. It justifies this claim as being for someone's "good." In a democracy, or socialism, or communism (really all just variants of the same "ism") the "someone" for whom we are giving up our Jurisdiction is "the greater." We do it all for "the greater good." It's different in a "Kingdom," but sometimes even Kings claim that they are stealing from the masses (taking their property from them in "taxes") and enslaving them in serfdom really just for their "own good."

It's all the same fraud, with a different wrapping. The fraud is one of a fraudulent claim on Jurisdiction. Once we understand this, we will never have to fear the "ignorant," because they won't have the power to Rule us. It won't be built into the system.