Thomas Sowell grew up poor in Harlem and spent his twenties as a Marxist. A job inside the federal government ended that. Asked what changed his mind, he gave a one-word answer: "facts." Chicago sharpened the habit, with Milton Friedman teaching him, and he carried it through more than 45 books and a column in over 150 newspapers. From housing to the minimum wage, he checked what policies did and ignored what their authors promised. His most famous line sits in A Conflict of Visions: "There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs." Politicians hate that sentence because it puts everyone selling solutions out of work. Every program has a price, and voters rarely pay it. Sowell lived by it. When the Reagan administration put him on an economic advisory committee, he resigned after the first meeting. He pointed to Friedman's view that some individuals "contribute more by staying out of government." He retired from writing in December 2016 at 86 and turned 96 this June. His method fits on an index card: skip the promises, check the results. Now go ahead and do that with your local ruling class.