It doesn’t worry me a bit that China and Japan hold so much US debt. In a way, it seems foolish for them to do it because they get lower returns than they might elsewhere. But that is their business.
The present oil crisis has not been produced by the oil companies. It is a result of government mismanagement exacerbated by the Mideast war.
How can thinking people believe that a government that cannot deliver the mail can deliver gas better than Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Gulf, and the rest?
By encouraging men to spy and report on one another, by making it in the private interest of large numbers of citizens to evade the controls, and by making actions illegal that are in the public interest, the controls undermine individual morality.
It is a mark of how far we have gone on the road to serfdom that government allocation and rationing of oil is the automatic response to the oil crisis.
People who intend only to serve public interest are led by invisible hand to private interest which was no part of their intention.
I do not believe there is a natural resource economics. I believe there is good economics and bad economics.
Everywhere, and at all times, economic progress has meant far more to the poor than to the rich.
The broader and more influential organisations of businessmen have acted to undermine the basic foundation of the free market system they purport to represent and defend.
Not all schooling is education nor all education, schooling.
Germany has a very able and productive workforce. It has high-quality products that are valued all over the world. It has every opportunity to be a productive, growing state. It just has to give its entrepreneurs a chance. It has to let them make money, hire and fire, and act like entrepreneurs.
John Lott documents how far ‘politically correct’ vested interests are willing to go to denigrate anyone who dares disagree with them. Lott has done us all a service by his thorough, thoughtful scholarly approach to a highly controversial issue.
We don’t have a desperate need to grow. We have a desperate desire to grow.
Government is a way by which every individual believes he can live at the expense of everybody else.
On aging societies, there is no reason why a country that has a lot of old people can’t be prosperous if, during their working lives, individuals provide for their retirement.
Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery.
How did we make the transition from using wood to using coal, from using coal to using oil, from using oil to using natural gas? How in God’s name did we make that transition without a Federal Energy Agency?
Japan has introduced fiscal stimulus five times in the past seven or eight years and each time it’s been a failure and that’s not a surprise. Fiscal stimulus is not stimulating in and of itself.
Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.
The stock market and economy are two different things.