SOS From A Troubled Sowell

Editorial - August 13th, 2010 - Investor's Business Daily

Doomsters are a dime a dozen. But when a leading economist who's been called "the nation's greatest contemporary philosopher" sees serious trouble ahead, we'd better listen up.

Thomas Sowell's 45th book, "Dismantling America," is a collection of 100 of the Hoover Institution scholar's best newspaper columns. For book purposes, they're called essays — but they retain the brevity, clarity and simple profundity of the columns that have graced our "On The Right" column for years.

It is hard to read this book report. It is even harder reading the book. Since his early days as the smartest editorial writer in Forbes magazine, I have admired Thomas Sowell. I am not alone in thinking that he is brilliant, as noted in the first paragraph of the book report. Thomas Sowell has honestly earned the admiration expressed when calling him "the nation's greatest contemporary philosopher."

It is thus depressing to see him so gloomy about our future.

Thomas Sowells' 3 books on economics, Basic Economics, Applied Economics and Economic Facts and Fallacies are all you need to read to be an expert in a field which few have truly mastered. Sowell's Intellectuals and Society is equally brilliant in the world of politics.

With masterful books on education and the destruction of our heritage by the unions who encouraged subversion while teaching our kids, Sowell has helped many of us understand how we came to the place in which our nation finds itself today.

This new book is important. It is helping more of us to stop the incredible focus on side issues at a time when national survival has to be our focus. We are in crisis and as the young of an earlier generation were fond of saying, many still "do not get it!"