This is my second book by Thomas Sowell, and it is a treasure chest. I read it twice in the past, and now through Audible. It contains four short books (or four long essays) whose main themes are within the disciplines of political philosophy, sociology, history, and legal scholarship, but each chapter contains an element of all four guided by the lens of an economist. The Quest for Cosmic Justice is an adventure, a quest, a walk-through good reasoning skills, and proper analysis of social and historical events. It is also one of the most eye-opening books, in all of its chapters. Every chapter has insight to offer, and each insight is essential for a coherent understanding of these four disciplines, guided by the economic way of thinking.

The first chapter, The Quest for Cosmic Justice, talks about the social nature of justice, and the prerequisites to attaining any semblance of justice on this planet of flesh-and-blood human beings. It reminds us that sometimes, achieving justice in sector A comes at the cost of achieving justice in sector B. Sometimes, doing justice to person C comprises of an injustice done to person D. The world is extremely complicated, and it has limited resources, and the costs of achieving justice matter. For example, many physicians and public health experts said at the beginning of the pandemic that if the lockdowns resulted in saving at least 100 lives, then it is worthwhile — but such a conclusion is lacking: Saving 100 lives (the persons A1, A2, …, A100) can be done through methods that might result in the death of 10,000 lives (persons B1, B2, …, B10,000). Rawls’s theory of helping abstract placements of which persons might occupy by assuring a level of privileges so that if someone is randomly born into that position he might not suffer such a terrible life and have an equally terrible (if not worse) fate is really a noble goal… Until we realize that such policies that promise to do that might lead to other persons, in a totally uncalculated manner, to have terrible lives and fates. Maoist China, for example, as was promised, would be a state that would secure equality and human dignity for all, but delivered a hell on Earth, and a rapist bloodthirsty emperor, who seized all power and authority into his hands to reach his goal of a perfect society. Almost everyone considers justice to be an essential quality in any society, but our visions of justice might be the downfall of such a society. Especially if our theoretical states-of-affairs were populated by abstract, instead of flesh-and-blood, humans.

The second chapter, The Mirage of Equality, is one of the most beautiful essays written on the nature of equality. As Sowell explains, when I say that 1 = 1, or that 1 + 5 = 6, what I mean is that they are equal in magnitudes. If I define 1 + 5 to be 15, which is acceptable, I will not any more retain the properties of the operation + working on real numbers; i.e., 1 + 5 ≠ 5 + 1, and 1 + 1 = 11 ≠ 2. The problems we have in the social sciences is our confused use and mixing of the terms inequality. The term itself is used equivocally, but its results are attributed collectively to all its definitions. Essentially, there are three main meanings of the term equality in the social sciences: Equality under the law (which means there is a set of laws that applies to everyone, regardless); then, there is equality of opportunity (which includes the intervention of a central authority to equalize opportunities, so that people can compete fairly); and finally, there is equality of outcome (which grants the central authority total power in engineering society — read, all persons in a geographic region — so that everyone has a relatively equal set of macro- or micro- goods and services). Equality in the last sense created totalitarian societies, authoritarian in character and suffocating to individuals. Our current societies are, to some degree, in the second camp where there are many political offices and bureaucracies focusing on manufacturing equality of opportunity. This is one reason behind the many interventions to our natural freedoms in contemporary life and in all states: It is hard to be left alone without seeing some encroachment to equalize the opportunities of people, be it in the educational sector or the medical sector. And of course, this is done to various degrees of interventionism. The last kind of freedom, the one advocated by both Sowell and Hayek, is closest to the libertarian society among the three, in which nature is given as is, and it is up to individuals to accommodate to these circumstances and help others if that was desired. Many critics claim that such societies do not value those down-trodden and in most need, but that’s superficial and obviously false. Affecting to help the poor does not result, by necessity, in eliminating poverty, and encouraging responsibility, even if some of the poor were not given the level of attention desired, is often an expedient solution that results in eliminating poverty completely. An important comment has to be mentioned here as well: Who are the poor and who are the rich to which we want to equalize? We know a handful of poor people and another handful of rich people. And though these handfuls might be among the hardcore poor and rich, the elements of rich and poor people are not stable. Most of those extremely poor are really young people who will become richer as they age. In fact, most of the bottom 20% reach the top 20% for at least 5 years in their lifetimes. And most of the top 1% do not stay there for more than 20 years. The bottom 20% is a fixed category, but not its elements. And many of the Stiglitzian and Pickettian economists commit these fallacies, as well as professors of history and sociology when they ignore these basic facts and fall into these amateurish errors.

The third chapter, The Tyranny of Visions, explores a topic Sowell has written about in many of his volumes, especially his book, A Conflict of Visions. When thinkers use different methodological tools to evaluate historical or statistical claims, and when they build their theories on different axioms, they are bound to differ on results. Moreover, this often explains why many political factions agree on some claims and disagree on that specific subject with the other factions. What links and separates them are their visions, which are loosely defined to be the way they see the world. Many Keynesians and Marxists see the world as a negative-sum game: This means that one person’s cost is another person’s profit, and where there is no profiting party, the world is ultimately at a loss. Capitalists and libertarians view the world, as a positive-sum game, generally, and understand that the ‘pie’ expands, that not all profit is exploitation, and that not all loss has evil behind it. The Tyranny of Visions focuses mostly on how intellectuals tried to enforce their visions on others, be it in the case of the USSR where a vision was enforced on the people, and ultimately, one of the most destroyed civilizations teetered to collapse because of a misunderstanding of many economic facts, or the case of pacifism vs. militarism as a deterrent for wars. The latter was a subject that occupied most of the chapter. Thinkers like Anatole France, Jean-Paul Sartre, Neville Chamberlain, George Bernard Shaw, Knut Hamsun, Bertrand Russel, and many others who either pushed for Naziism or pacifism or as the early proponents of the London School of Economics, Fabianism, were surprised to see how much their ideologies backfired. How quickly France succumbed. How unprepared the United Kingdom and the United States were for Hitler’s regime. It is not an excuse that they did not know any better, since the opposition back then was not only ignored, but often actively censored, and it was people like Chamberlain and Russel who pushed for the censorship of people like Churchill who kept warning about Hitler’s armament. In one of the moving passages of the book, Sowell reminds us that militarism and armament have done their job when it has produced massively destructive weapons that were not used in battle, but in deterring opponents. War is an evil. But war became a necessary evil when the precautions and preparations were not taken, and when certain visions (whether it was the push for war in WWI to achieve glory and turn the world into democratic entities —see Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed—, or as in WWII, where the turn to democratic socialism eased the way for authoritarian leaders to seize all the power from the citizens and reduce the people to serfs —see Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom).

The final book — The Quiet Repeal of the American Revolution — is quite sorrowing, and sobering. It is about the slow erosion of the ideas that made the American Revolution what it is, and that made the United States of America, at certain periods, the freest state on Earth, and the most prosperous. This chapter talks about this vision of the founding fathers, of inserting rights as god-ordained, pre-existing in the constitution. We all have certain (inalienable) rights. These rights are not granted to us by the state. Even in the lack of a state, they exist as what Aquinas calls Natural Rights. They mean that you are free to behave with your body as you wish. That you are free to act in ways concerning your property that others do not approve of. That even though burning all your money might seem stupid to us, you are free to do that. That you can enter any contract between other consenting adults (you being among one of the parties), and that no one can intervene. And most importantly, no one has any business to interfere with your plans based on what you will do to your own property, so long as you do not engage in aggression against others. These simple understandings have been replaced by many interventions that make the United States today unrecognizable to the founding fathers. They would be astonished by how much we have by ourselves given our freedoms away to the same authoritarians the revolution was fought and one to push. Moreover, the chapter focuses on the judicial activism that was practiced in the last 150 years, which had done away with much of the wisdom of the founding fathers, those ancients in the horse-and-buggy era. Today, prison reform often means putting criminals back into society so that they may injure others again. Distributing the successful’s money in an attempt at creating equality, which ultimately widens the inequality gap. Banning guns leads to more gun homicides and disarming those compliant with the rules. Forbidding doctors to take the risks that their patients agree to take to fix their ailments. And so on and so forth. This drive to create fair outcomes, instead of applying the law, ultimately destroys the concept of the rule of law and creates economic uncertainties that ruin people’s lives. Judicial Activism enforces the judge’s (or the Supreme Court’s) visions of fairness and justice on parties who acted based on laws already given, but on which they will not be judged on. The America of the founding fathers is not the one the founding fathers wished to achieve, and this regression was piecemeal and disjointly calculated.

Rochester, New York,
February, 2022.