Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations.
The power to do good is also the power to do harm.
What you have as a result of past policies is that German entrepreneurs go outside of Germany for many of their activities. They are investing abroad instead of at home because there isn’t the openness, fluidity and opportunity they find outside their borders.
One man’s opportunism is another man’s statesmanship.
Making prohibition work is like making water run uphill; it’s against nature.
Germany cannot get out of the euro. What it has to do, therefore, is make the economy more flexible – to eliminate the restrictions on prices, on wages and on employment; in short, the regulations that keep 10 percent of the German workforce unemployed.
Complete free trade is not politically feasible. Why? Because it’s only in the general interest and in no one’s special interest.
I know of no severe depression, in any country or any time, that was not accompanied by a sharp decline in the stock of money, and equally of no sharp decline in the stock of money that was not accompanied by a severe depression.
The use of quantity of money as a target has not been a success. I’m not sure that I would as of today push it as hard as I once did.
And where are you going to get these angels who are going to run society for us?
We had much freer trade in the 19th century. We have much less globalization now than we did then.
In response to a suggestion that total free trade would end in cheaper foreign products flooding the market and causing unemployment.
Pick at random any three letters from the alphabet, put them in any order, and you will have an acronym designating a federal agency we can do without.
I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40 percent of our national income.
In a bureaucratic system, useless work drives out useful work.
If you pay people not to work and tax them when they do, don’t be surprised if you get unemployment.
Money is a very powerful thing, which you hardly notice when it goes right, but which can create havoc when it goes wrong.
What would the people who sold us goods do with the money? They’d get dollars. What would they do with the dollars? Eat them?!
What is not forbidden in Sweden, is obligatory.
Rich people are the experimental ground for every new development. The nature of progress is that what begins as a luxury for the rich becomes a necessity for the poor as it’s developed and passed on.