A crackpot theory. Instead of saying labor’s exploited, as Marx did, Kelso says capital’s exploited. It’s worse than Marx. It’s Marx stood on its head.
I am a limited-government libertarian.
Humility is the distinguishing virtue of the believer in freedom; arrogance, of the paternalist.
The collapse of communism in essence added tens and tens of millions of people to the world labor supply, and the people who were added had previously been getting very low income, but they were not unskilled. Many of them were fairly well educated.
There’s no point in comparing an actual, operating system with an ideal system that doesn’t exist.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Ronald Reagan was by far the greatest. Because he had real principles and he stuck by them. He made clear what he was going to do, and he did it. He didn’t back down.
The big problem for a democratic government – democrat with a small “d” – is how to hold down government spending.
Saying it is one thing. Doing it is very different.
There’s no way to avoid a burden on your freedom. The costs themselves are a burden on your freedom. The restrictions that are necessary in order to get rid of the terrorists are a burden to your freedom. So there’s no way in the short run to avoid a restriction on your freedom.
You mustn’t judge a politician by talk. You have to judge them by performance.
Now here’s somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he’s caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it’s absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That’s the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons.
The key insight of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.
Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men. The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated – a system of checks and balances.
Not all ‘schooling’ is ‘education,’ and not all ‘education’ is ‘schooling’.
Sloppy writing reflects sloppy thinking.
The power to do good is also the power to do harm; those who control the power today may not tomorrow; and, more important, what one man regards as good, another may regard as harm.
Believers in aristocracy and socialism share a faith in centralized rule, in rule by command rather than by voluntary cooperation.
None of this means that government does not have a very real function. Indeed, the tragedy is that because government is doing so many things it ought not to be doing, it performs the functions it ought to be performing badly. The basic functions of government are to defend the nation against foreign enemies, to prevent coercion of some individuals by others within the country, to provide a means of deciding on our rules, and to adjudicate disputes.3.
The family, rather than the individual, has always been and remains today the basic building block of our society, though its hold has clearly been weakening – one of the most unfortunate consequences of the growth of government paternalism.
Only people have incomes and they derive them through the market from the resources they own, whether these be in the form of corporate stock, or of bonds, or of land, or of their personal capacity.