I have long been a critic of Social Security, basically because I believe that it is not the business of government to tell people what fraction of their incomes they should devote to providing for their own or someone else’s old age.
When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.
Every economist knows that minimum wages either do nothing or cause inflation and unemployment. That’s not a statement, it’s a definition.
Adam Smith’s key insight was that both parties to an exchange can benefit and that, so long as cooperation is strictly voluntary, no exchange can take place unless both parties do benefit.
It is true that a competitive market is not the whole of society. A great deal depends on the qualities of the population and the nation in how they organize the non-market aspects of society.
Anybody who was easily converted was not worth converting.
The price works so well, so efficiently, that we are not aware of it most of the time.
The preservation of liberty, not the promotion of efficiency, is the primary justification for private property. Efficiency is a happy, though not accidental, by-product – and a most important by-product because liberty could not have survived if it had not also produced affluence.
There have been unions based on gold or silver, but not on fiat money – money tempted to inflate – put out by politically independent entities.
To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them.
The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus.
It’s a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don’t approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else.
Unfortunately, unanimity is not always feasible.
The euro is going to be a big source of problems, not a source of help.
Every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that’s a different question. He’s always the special case. He ought to get special privileges from the government, a tariff, this, that and the other thing.
The evidence of history speaks with a single voice. I do not know any exception to the proposition that if you compare like with like, the freer the system, the better off the ordinary poor people have been.
Never try to walk across a river just because it has an average depth of four feet.
Economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems.
The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.
A society based on the freedom to choose is better than a society based on the principles of socialism, communism and coercion.