Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens.
It is fascinating to watch politicians come up with 'solutions' to problems that are a direct result of their previous solutions. In many cases, the most efficient thing to do would be to repeal their previous solution and stop being so gung-ho for creating new solutions in the future. But, politically, that is the last thing they will do.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Politicians often create problems with their solutions, yet they prefer to keep adding new solutions instead of repealing the original ones.
This quote by Thomas Sowell critiques the cycle of political decision-making, where solutions proposed by politicians frequently lead to new issues that need further solutions. Instead of reevaluating and potentially rescinding ineffective measures, politicians tend to plow ahead with new initiatives, revealing a reluctance to admit mistakes and a tendency to complicate situations rather than simplify them.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a political debate, one could use this quote to highlight how politicians fail to learn from their past mistakes.
More from Thomas Sowell
All quotes →Blacks were not enslaved because they were black but because they were available. Slavery has existed in the world for thousands of years. Whites enslaved other whites in Europe for centuries before the first black was brought to the Western hemisphere. Asians enslaved Europeans. Asians enslaved other Asians. Africans enslaved other Africans, and indeed even today in North Africa, blacks continue to enslave blacks.
One of the reasons for conspiracy theories is an assumption that people in high places always know what they are doing. When they do something that makes no sense, devious reasons are imagined by conspiracy theorists, when in fact it may be due to plain old ignorance and incompetence.
You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.
The real problem, both in discussions of mass shootings and in discussions of gun control, is that too many people are too committed to a vision to allow mere facts to interfere with their beliefs, and the sense of superiority that those beliefs give them.
Why is history important? Without history, many people have no idea how many of today's half-baked ideas have been tried, again and again - and have repeatedly led to disaster. Most of these ideas are not new. They are just being recycled with re-treaded rhetoric.
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I believe that democracies do not go to war; that's the lesson of history, and I think that a democratic Pakistan is the world community's best guarantee of stability in Asia.
My first reaction to Trump being elected was a visceral one. I cried for black people in general but, more particularly, for those of us at the margins who have been struggling and who have never received enough support.
Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
Deregulation is a transfer of power from the trodden to the treading. It is unsurprising that all conservative parties claim to hate big government.
Labor # Unions are the leading force for # democratization and # progress .
Bad government is the natural product of rule by those who believe government is bad.