The Soviet experience was much worse than experts in the West had thought. That discovery had a tremendous impact both on the intellectual community and on the public at large.
Society doesn’t have values. People have values.
We economists don’t know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can’t sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly you’ll have a tomato shortage. It’s the same with oil or gas.
He moves fastest who moves alone.
World trade depends on differences among countries, not similarities. Different countries are in different stages of development. It is appropriate for them to have different patterns, different policies for ecology, labor standards, and so forth.
Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power.
If you really want to engage in policy activity, don’t make that your vocation. Make it your avocation. Get a job. Get a secure base of income. Otherwise, you’re going to get corrupted and destroyed.
What kind of society isn’t structured on greed?
Now that I’m 60, every morning I look in the mirror and say, “I don’t know who you are, stranger, but I’m gonna shave you anyway”.
The black market was a way of getting around government controls. It was a way of enabling the free market to work. It was a way of opening up, enabling people.
The euro is good for Europe. But only if there is flexibility all around.
If even a small fraction of the money we now spend on trying to enforce drug prohibition were devoted to treatment and drug rehabilitation, in an atmosphere of compassion not punishment, the reduction in drug usage and in the harm done to users could be dramatic.
What does it mean to say that government might have a responsibility? Government can’t have a responsibility any more than the business can. The only entities which can have responsibilities are people.
If China don’t free up the political side, its economic growth will come to an end – while it is still at a very low level.
There is only one social responsibility of business.
The real tragedy of minimum wage laws is that they are supported by well-meaning groups who want to reduce poverty. But the people who are hurt most by higher minimums are the most poverty stricken.
The free market is not only a more efficient decision maker than even the wisest central planning body, but even more important, the free market keeps economic power widely dispersed.
China’s productive system draws upon the other East Asian countries to a great extent. The volume of trade is much larger than the net amount being exported from China. China needs substantial reserves to finance all that.
No major institution in the US has so poor a record of performance over so long a period as the Federal Reserve, yet so high a public reputation.
The case against a fully independent central bank is strong indeed.