Everybody Thinks They Want Change…

I broke tradition and don’t have a quote for you from a friend or family member. Instead, it’s from somebody WAY smarter from myself: Thomas Sowell. I mean, don’t you think you’d have to be pretty durned smart to get your economics degree from Harvard, a master’s in economics from Columbia and then a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago? Here’s a quote from a recent column he wrote:

“…history shows any number of countries in crises worse than ours, where ‘change’ turned problems into catastrophes.

In czarist Russia, for example, the economy was worse than ours is today and the First World War was going far worse for the Russians than anything we have faced in Iraq. Moreover, Russians had nothing like the rights of Americans today. So they went for ‘change.’

That ‘change’ brought on a totalitarian regime that made the czars’ despotism look like child’s play. The Communists killed more people in one year than the czars killed in more than 90 years, not counting the millions who died in a government-created famine in the 1930s.

Other despotic regimes in China, Cuba, and Iran were similarly replaced by people who promised ‘change’ that turned out to be even worse than what went before.

Yet many today seem to assume that if things are bad, ‘change’ will make them better. Specifics don’t interest them nearly as much as inspiring rhetoric and confident style.”