The Cost of Admitting You are Wrong

Thomas Sowell writes in his book Economic Facts and Fallacies

"Whether moving people into government housing projects, giving them vouchers to subsidize their living in middle-class neighborhoods or moving large numbers of them from one city to another (New Orleans to Houston), the evidence is clear that changing people's location does not change their behavior. Yet the implicit assumption that it does continues to dominate social thought and government policy, both shaped by people who seldom live in the places to which problem people are moved, and who pay no price for being wrong. On the contrary, what would cost them dearly, in both personal and career terms, would be admitting they were wrong, that they had disrupted thousands of lives and wasted billions of taxpayer dollars."

What is government planning, according to Sowell? It is the "suppression of individual plans and the imposition of a politically or bureaucratically determined collective plan instead."