Politics & Power Quote by Thomas Sowell

A neat bit of rhetorical judo: Sowell frames a policy disagreement as a moral blackmail tactic, then flips it back onto liberals. The sentence is built to expose an implied accusation: that the left treats its preferred remedies not as contestable tools but as proof of compassion itself. If you reject the tool, you must be rejecting the people. That structure matters because it relocates the battlefield from outcomes to virtue, where persuasion becomes impossible and dissent becomes suspect.

Sowell's intent is less to litigate any single program than to delegitimize a common style of argument in American politics: the move from "my policy will help" to "if you oppose my policy, you are indifferent to suffering". He’s not denying that liberals care; he’s questioning the monopoly on caring. The subtext is a demand for pluralism in moral motivation: people can share goals (less poverty, more mobility, dignity) while disagreeing sharply on means (markets vs. state intervention, incentives vs. redistribution).

Contextually, this fits Sowell's long-running critique of what he sees as the "anointed" mindset: elites who treat their intentions as self-validating and insulate their policies from empirical failure by shifting the debate to moral standing. It's also a line that anticipates today's culture-war reflexes, where policy arguments are routinely recast as character indictments. The quote works because it names that move, in plain language, and dares the listener to separate empathy from ideology.