An Interview With Thomas Sowell

Economist, social critic, political commentator and author, Thomas Sowell is one of today's leading libertarian voices. A reformed marxist, Sowell is a strong believer in limited government. He is currently a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and his columns appear on places such as Institutional Investor, and Townhall.

 

John Hawkins of RightWingNews was able to sit Sowell down for an interview. Below are some highlights:

Thomas Sowell: I have never understood why a manufacturing job is different from a job in an insurance company or a bank or anywhere else. I mean it's just one those arbitrary things that people manage to get themselves worked up over.

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John Hawkins: Now, in recent years we started to hear more people calling to get rid of the Federal Reserve. Good idea, bad idea? What are your thoughts?

Thomas Sowell: Good idea.

John Hawkins: Good idea? What do you think we should replace it with? What do you think we should do? 

Thomas Sowell: Well it's like when you remove a cancer what do you replace it with?

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Thomas Sowell: Well if deficits were going to speed up economic growth, we would have runaway economic growth after all the TARP spending, the stimulus spending, and now the so called QE2 by the Federal Reserve. So I think there's no basis for that. If spending money was going to do it, I mean, the Weimar Republic would have been one of the most prosperous nations of all times because they had, I think it was, 1,700 printing presses running at one time, turning out money.

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John Hawkins: Yes, I agree. There's a worry that China could essentially engage in economic warfare against the United States because they hold so much of our debt. Should we be greatly concerned about that?

Thomas Sowell: Yes. For years, the Keynesians loved to downplay the importance of debt by saying we owe it ourselves. There are problems with that which I go into in Basic Economics. But there are even bigger problems when in fact, we don't owe it to ourselves, and something like 40 something percent of American debt is owed to foreigners. That means that at some point in the future, all those trillions of dollars worth of real goods and services in output of the American people will have to be shipped overseas to pay back the debt that we borrowed.

To read the entire interview at Right Wing News click here.