After chapter upon chapter telling of the counter-productiveness of government intervention in markets, the immigration section is entirely out of place. Apparently there's nothing wrong with heavy regulation and central planning in the case of workers wanting to cross borders. The lack of an appropriately weighty explanation for the inconsistency with the rest of the book casts everything else into doubt. Instead of a coherent and principled set of arguments, all the rest could be cherry picked statistics and anecdotes.

I expected 'thinking beyond stage one' to be about something grand where stage one was the first n-hundred years after the invention of something, but it just means longer term thinking. I got tired of hearing about how voters or elected representatives (Sowell always uses the more pejorative term 'politicians') should have been thinking beyond stage 1 when some law eventually had the opposite effect of intended. He could have dropped the subtitle and used a few other phrases to say the same thing, or better yet let the reader make that conclusion.

Lots of explanations for the status quo, but where Sowell is critical there aren't any suggestions for how to fix things. It's either not broken and trying to fix it will make it worse, or it's just broken- where frequently Sowell implies that democracy itself that is broken.

Over-use of the word 'particular', usually around bland generalizations with very little content- it wouldn't be that hard to substitute some real details.

There isn't any big picture analysis to show the relative economic importance of say driving after age 75 vs. owners of dangerous dogs not paying proportionally vs. government funded health care, it's all put on equal terms.