I would like to point out and second the opinion expressed else where on the internet today that if Thomas Sowell or any other man of his beliefs were in the white house there would not be "tea partys".

PS my order for "Intellectuals and Society" will be at my door as soon as Amazon.com can get it shipped and USPO can deliver it.

There is a special place in He## for professors like President Wilson and Obama. Wilson spent 8years as president of Princeton during which he showed his progressive attitude in admissions of students.

Obama spent 12 years as a lecturer, not a tenured professor as his sycophhants claim, in the Law school, and taught Lanisky type reform in one of his classes.His lecture time was from 1992-2004.

No way of knowing how many Law students bought into his socialistist ideology!

There is a special place in He## for professors like President Wilson and Obama. Wilson spent 8years as president of Princeton during which he showed his progressive attitude in admissions of students.

Obama spent 12 years as a lecturer, not a tenured professor as his sycophhants claim, in the Law school, and taught Lanisky type reform in one of his classes.His lecture time was from 1992-2004.

No way of knowing how many Law students bought into his socialistist ideology!

G. Wegmann,

I am not sure how many law students or law school graduates bought Obama's socialist ideology or Saul Alinsky's. From my experience, I can tell you with certainty that many are die-hard liberals who disdain ordinary people and feel entitled to society's spoils as superior elites. And, as an aside, most of them have undergraduate degrees in English. I cannot say that I have EVER met a professor of English who was not a liberal worshipping Castro or Che Guevara.

They see something bad so they assume anything they do will make it better. That's called the Piety Fallacy. Even some of our Conservative leaders fall prey to that one, so it must be a compelling one. The difference of course is that when one of OUR ideas doesn't work, we try something else. The Left just renames and repackages the same old ideas, no matter how many times they fail.

Finally people are noticing this. Evan Sayet has talked about it. Dennis Prager has talked about it. Thomas Sowell has talked about it. The Left bears no cost or consequence for their beliefs, and they judge themselves by their lovely intentions while judging the Right by our ugliest blunders.

If you take the "proctologist's view" of anything, it will come out looking pretty shabby. This is the approach intellectuals take toward America, Capitalism, humanity, Conservatism, morality, the Constitution, pretty much everything in life that is "good, right and successful."

Meanwhile, they take the rose-colored-glasses approach to their own affairs. Whenever history shows that a Leftist idea or policy led to murder, destruction and oppression, their solution is simple: blame it on the Right. Nazis were murderers? Well of course they were, after all Fascism is Right-wing! It's easy to think of yourself as morally superior when you blame everyone else for your failures (no matter how bizarre your reasoning must be to get it done).

Mr Prager noted that the Left loves beautiful words. This is why they still adore Communism even though it's killed roughly 90 million people, yet they despise the Nazis even though their nightmarish slaughter "only" killed 10-15 million. Mr Prager theorizes that Nazi speech was ugly, aggressive and unpleasant -- "you are a sub-human piece of garbage and we're murdering you" -- so the Left is not enthralled by it. Meanwhile, the brotherly language of Communist dogma -- "we regret the necessity of killing you, but it is necessary in the name of the greater good, the advancement of all humanity" -- sounds beautiful to the Leftist ear, so he focuses on those ideas and blots out the industrial-scale slaughter of millions of innocent people.

But we can try to explain this phenomenon all day long, and in the end it comes down to this: the Left puts on blinders and chooses to see whatever they want to see. They ignore the wholesale murder of millions, ignore the oppression, ignore the economic disasters, caused by Leftist ideologies. Instead they insist that no matter how many times their foolish ideas fail, the IDEAS are never to blame. They just weren't implemented by the right kind of person, with the right amount of money or with sufficient dedication. "If only" we had spent a few billion more, held out a little longer for the ideas to bear fruit, trusted our leaders more to deliver on their promises, been a little more patient, sacrificed a little more -- if only we'd tried harder, we could have achieved UTOPIA!

Anyone else reminded of the psychic who fails to connect with his mark, so he blames the sucker for not having enough faith? Or the faith healer who blames the lack of healing on the sick faithfuls' lack of piety? Why not stick with the time-tested Conservative principles that WORK? They are not perfect but they allow the maximum prosperity for the maximum number of people in the long run.

Wow! A blessing to read.

Great book. Additional chapters should be dedicated to other intellectuals such as Henry Knox, John Quincy Adams, Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, etc.

"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." -Orwell

Sowell writes: "Yet both secular and religious ideas have moved the emotions of many-- and have moved leaders who moved armies."

Again, Mr. Sowell has hit the nail directly on the head. Nothing could more amply demonstrate the truth of that assertion than the idea that took hold of our Commander In Chief in late 2002 and early 2003 and led him to commit the armies of this great country of our to a costly, destructive, unnecessary and unjustifiable war against Iraq.

Great book that should be required reading by all.

"the Left loves beautiful words. This is why they still adore Communism even though it's killed roughly 90 million people, yet they despise the Nazis even though their nightmarish slaughter "only" killed 10-15 million. Mr Prager theorizes that Nazi speech was ugly, aggressive and unpleasant -- "you are a sub-human piece of garbage and we're murdering you" -- so the Left is not enthralled by it. Meanwhile, the brotherly language of Communist dogma -- "we regret the necessity of killing you, but it is necessary in the name of the greater good, the advancement of all humanity" -- sounds beautiful to the Leftist ear, so he focuses on those ideas and blots out the industrial-scale slaughter of millions of innocent people."

Replace "Left" with "Anglo-American Imperialist", and "brotherly language of Communist dogma" with "brotherly language of Christian dogma", and the above remark would quite accurately apply to the systematic exptirpation (as Henry Know candidly called it) of the indigenous populations of North America. All this largely took place long before Karl Marx was born, and a couple of centuries before Stalin and Hitler. So, it's kinda hard to blame the commie boogieman.