Success Quote by Thomas Sowell

Sowell doesn’t bother with the pleasantries of policy debate; he goes straight for the villain: the lawyer, the “frivolous” lawsuit, the parasitic drag on an otherwise rational market. The word “Actually” is doing a lot of work here. It’s a thumb on the scale, implying that whatever reform is currently being sold as “cost-lowering” is either naive or dishonest. He’s not just arguing for tort reform; he’s framing the conversation as a reality check delivered to people enchanted by slogans.

The intent is surgical: redirect public anger about high premiums away from insurers and toward the legal system. In that sense, the quote is less about actuarial math than moral allocation of blame. “Making it harder” carries the quiet premise that the system is currently too easy to game, and that the costs of that gaming get passed down to ordinary people in the form of higher premiums. You’re meant to picture a meritless claim as a kind of tax levied by opportunists, with insurers cast as reluctant bill-payers rather than power brokers.

Context matters because Sowell’s broader project has long been to puncture progressive explanations that locate social problems in corporate misconduct or structural inequity. Here, he offers a clean, market-friendly causal chain: lawsuits drive costs; costs drive premiums; clamp down on lawsuits and the price comes down. The subtext, of course, is that regulation aimed at insurers is performative, while the real fix requires disciplining the plaintiff’s bar. It’s a classic Sowell move: use plain language and a commonsense posture to smuggle in an ideological rearrangement of who deserves scrutiny.