Many intellectuals, living in the safety and comfort of free societies, have found it expedient to redefine freedom, so that an expansion of government determination of economic outcomes, through an expansion of government compulsion, is not seen as a trade-off of freedom, as conveniently redefined.
In the world of words, the hardest facts can be made to vanish into thin air by a clever catchword or soaring rhetoric. In a public discourse where slogans and images have too often replaced facts and logic, words have indeed become for some what Hobbes called them, centuries ago— the money of fools, often counterfeit money created by clever people. Our educational system, which might have been expected to develop students’ ability to “cross-examine the facts,” as the great economist Alfred Marshall once put it, has itself become one of the fountainheads of insinuations and obfuscations.
Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities, pg.148-149.
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