Americans know very little about social statistics, but I am not sure that it’s important that Americans know about social statistics.
One of the reasons that I am in favor of less government is because when you have more government, industrialists take it over.
Economists may not know how to run the economy, but they know how to create shortages or gluts simply by regulating prices below the market, or artificially supporting them from above.
Reality ensures that the end of history will never come.
Prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse – for both the addict and the rest of us.
The long-range sloution to high unemployment is to increase the incentive for ordinary people to save, invest, work, and employ others. We make it costly for employers to employ people; we subsidize people not to go to work We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
The Great Depression in the United States, far from being a sign of the inherent instability of the private enterprise system, is a testament to how much harm can be done by mistakes on the part of a few men when they wield vast power over the monetary system of the country.
I think almost every economist would agree that government gets itself in trouble when it tries to interfere with voluntary behavior.
You never can cure poverty. Poverty is in the eye of the beholder.
I know of no example in time or place of a society that has been marked by a large measure of political freedom, and that has not also used something comparable to a free market to organize the bulk of economic activity.
So long as large sums of money are involved – and they are bound to be if drugs are illegal – it is literally impossible to stop the traffic, or even to make a serious reduction in its scope.
The one thing that’s missing, but that will soon be developed, is a reliable e-cash, a method whereby on the Internet you can transfer funds from A to B, without A knowing B or B knowing A.
Cutting government spending and government intrusion in the economy will almost surely involve immediate gain for the many, short-term pain for the few, and long-term gain for all.
Personal freedom has grown greatly within China, and that will provoke ever more points of conflict between the individual and state.
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.
I think that the Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government.
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.
Anybody who was easily converted was not worth converting.