From December 22, 2014, a topical repost in keeping with today’s QotD:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdBn7MUM3Yo?rel=0&vq=hd720]
Quote of the Day, from the end of the interview:
Peter Robinson: How’s my generation’s project of holding on to liberty coming along?
Thomas Sowell: Not well. One of the reasons I’m glad to be as old as I am is that it means I may be spared seeing what’s going to happen to this country, either internally or as the result of international complications.Robinson: You think that America’s greatest days are gone? Full stop? That it’s irreversible?
Sowell: Nothing is irreversible. But I think that we’re like a team that is coming to bat in the bottom of the ninth, five runs behind. We can win it, but this is not… I wouldn’t bet the rent money on it.
Robinson: Last question. What would you say – talking about Milton (Friedman) talking to my generation – what would you say to the next generation, to your grandchildren’s generation about the America for which they should be preparing themselves?
Sowell: Since I don’t know what that America is going to be, I don’t want to say anything to them. By the time they get here I think the issue will have been settled one way or the other.
Robinson: By then it will be irreversible.
Sowell: Either we will have pulled out of the dive, as it were, or else it will be all over.