Inflation does not lubricate trade but by rescuing traders from their errors of optimism or stupidity.
If it is dangerous to suppose that government is always right, it will sooner or later be awkward for public administration if most people suppose that it is always wrong.
What is called a high standard of living consists, in considerable measure, in arrangements for avoiding muscular energy, for increasing sensual pleasure and enhancing caloric intake above any conceivable nutritional requirement.
Genius is a rising stock market.
The threat to men of great dignity, privilege and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth. Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great – a little understood thing.
Decision has greater virtue and force if taken after there has been eloquent dissent.
Technology, under all circumstances, leads to planning; in its higher manifestations it may put the problems of planning beyond the reach of the industrial firm. Technological compulsions, and not ideology or political will, will require the firm to seek the help and protection of the state.
Agriculture is one economic activity that does not obey the laws of demand and supply.
It is a well known and very important fact that America’s founding fathers did not like taxation without representation. It is a lesser known and equally important fact that they did not much like taxation with representation.
We shall have a race of men who are strong on telemetry and space communications but who cannot read anything but a blueprint or write anything but a computer program.
The Senate has unlimited debate; in the House, debate is ruthlessly circumscribed. There is frequent discussion as to which technique most effectively frustrates democratic process.
Superficial observers have long criticized the United States for making a fetish of youth. This is unfair. Uniquely among modern organs of public and private administration, its national legislature rewards senility.
Foreign policy is conducted for the convenience and enjoyment of people in Washington.
Technology means the systematic application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks.
No ethic is as ethical as the work ethic.
Unemployment is rarely considered desirable except by those who have not experienced it.
If anything is evident about people who manage money, it is that the task attracts a very low level of talent, one that is protected in its highly imperfect profession by the mystery that is thought to enfold the subject of economics in general and of money in particular.
Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.
In all modern depressions, recessions, or growth-correction, as variously they are called, we never miss the goods that are not produced. We miss only the opportunities for the labour – for the jobs – that are not provided.
In economics it is a far, far wiser thing to be right than to be consistent.