Wit & Attitude Quote by Thomas Sowell

Sowell’s line lands like a courtroom closing argument: clipped, accusatory, and built to make “decision-making” sound less like policy and more like negligence. The sting is in the pairing of “stupid” and “dangerous.” He’s not just calling bad governance inefficient; he’s framing it as a moral hazard with body count. The target isn’t error itself, but insulated error - the kind that persists because the people who authorize it don’t absorb the fallout.

The subtext is classic public-choice suspicion: institutions don’t magically transmute self-interest into public virtue. If the incentives are misaligned, rational people will behave irrationally at society’s expense. “Pay no price” invokes a market logic of accountability - losses discipline decision-makers; consequences teach. By implying that accountability is the missing feedback loop, he smuggles in a broader claim: expertise and good intentions are not substitutes for skin in the game.

Context matters. Sowell wrote and spoke through decades of debates over Great Society programs, bureaucratic expansion, and technocratic confidence in social engineering. The quote is an anti-technocrat flare shot into a culture that routinely treats “policy” as a clean, reversible experiment. His real punch is against asymmetry: the planner gets prestige, the constituent gets the risk.

It works because it turns a procedural critique into an ethical one. If you can make choices for others without personal cost, you’re not merely governing; you’re gambling with someone else’s chips.