Amazing Thomas Sowell Quote

In Discrimination and Disparities, Thomas Sowell states the following:

Two of the monumental catastrophes of the twentieth century--Nazism and Communism--led to the slaughter of millions of human beings, in the name of either ridding the world of the burden of "inferior" races or ridding the world of "exploiters" responsible for the poverty of the exploited. While each of these beliefs might have been testable hypotheses, their greatest political triumphs came as dogmas placed beyond the reach of evidence or logic.

Neither Hitler's Mein Kampf nor Marx's Capital was an exercise in hypothesis testing. While Karl Marx's vast three-volume economic treatise was a far greater intellectual achievement, "exploitation" was at no point in its 2,500 pages treated as a testable hypothesis, but was instead the foundation assumption on which an elaborate intellectual superstructure was built. And that proved to be a foundation of quicksand. Getting rid of capitalist "exploiters" in Communist countries did not raise the living standards of workers, even to levels common in many capitalist countries, where workers were presumably still being exploited, as Marxists conceived the term. 

This emphasis on theory at the expense of observation, I argue elsewhere, is when the true split between body and mind began to occur (not the Middle Ages). Adam Smith attempted to explain economics by observing how people behaved. Late 19th century theorists, on the other hand, attempted to explain economics by producing theories and then forcing evidence/behavior into their theoretical patterns. Their theories were proscriptive rather than descriptive.

Startling difference.