Thomas Sowell Is My Homie Long Sleeve
Thomas Sowell had already become a Marine and served in the Korean War by the time he attended Harvard. He didn’t like the attitude at Crimson, calling it a place where “smug assumptions were too often treated as substitutes for evidence or logic.” We expect future historians will regard our current era as the Age of Smug Assumptions, so we extend our condolences to Mr. Sowell for having to share it with us.
Mr. Sowell did his Ph.D. studies at University of Chicago. Interestingly, he didn’t actually abandon Marxist theory as the result of breathing the same oxygen as Milton Friedman. While working for the Department of Labor, Mr. Sowell noticed that raising the minimum wage was pricing people out of jobs in Puerto Rico. When he brought this to his coworkers’ attention, they shrugged it off. Thus Mr. Sowell experienced two libertarian wake-up calls: The government isn’t good for the economy, and government bureaucrats don’t care.
And then there was another big moment in Mr. Sowell’s early life, which came while he worked at the Public Health Service in 1959. A man had a heart attack outside the main office. He wasn’t a government employee, so the bureaucrats didn’t admit him to the on-site medical facility. Instead they called for an ambulance – during rush hour. “He died waiting for a doctor, in a building full of doctors,” said Mr. Sowell.
Mr. Sowell let his experiences shape his beliefs. If you’re still reading this, then your own beliefs have likely already been shaped by Mr. Sowell. You do not know the great economist personally, but you are proud to call him your homie.
