On immigration, Trump needs an articulate policy that aims to secure the border and keep out illegals while letting in skilled legal workers.

Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.

Praxeology - economics - provides no ultimate ethical judgments: it simply furnishes the indispensable data necessary to make such judgments.

If someone says to you, Go to an old-folks home, thats kind of ridiculous, because a lot of old people are doing terrific things for society.

Marxism is the only doctrine that both satisfies the demands for progress and provides a safe outlet for moral expression in a skeptical age.

As I've often said, you can shop online and find whatever you're looking for, but bookstores are where you find what you weren't looking for.

Unsustainable situations usually go on longer than most economists think possible. But they always end, and when they do, it's often painful.

Despite the high salaries involved, employing economists is a cost-effective way for banks, and stockbrokers to secure exposure in the media.

For better or worse, US Keynesianism was so far ahead of where it started. I am a cafeteria Keynesian. You know what a cafeteria catholic is?

What is the one bright spot on the entire horizon that would give someone an opportunity to be retrained to learn new skills? Direct selling.

Changes like the telephone and telegraphy, which tend to reduce the cost of organizing spatially, will tend to increase the size of the firm.

When you start off by telling those who disagree with you that they are not merely in error but in sin, how much of a dialogue do you expect?

Value is the most invincible and impalpable of ghosts, and comes and goes unthought of, while the visible and dense matter remains as it was.

Anyone willing to do what is required to become president of the United States is thereby barred from taking that office. I'm only half joking

Democracy is an experimental system. I like it when states try out new ideas. I think we ought to expand, not contract, our federalist system.

Violence is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible people, championed by proficient artisans of terror.

Although low inflation is generally good, inflation that is too low can pose risks to the economy - especially when the economy is struggling.

If we're going to forecast the business cycle, surely it is a good idea to know the business cycle. Sounds reasonable, but it's not that easy.

At some risk of oversimplification, I suggest that the usual reason a business cycle turns into a monster is an overdose of government policy.

Economists actually disagree about whether there are significant economic returns from attending an elite college versus a less-selective one.

Governments have always played an important role in energy investment, but this role has been increasing due to both geography and technology.

The state itself becomes more and more identified with the interests of those who run things than with the interests of the people in general.

The pace of increases in labor compensation provides another possible indicator, albeit an imperfect one, of the degree of labor market slack.

Poverty" Pitt exclaimed "is no disgrace but it is damned annoying." In the contemporary United States it is not annoying but it is a disgrace.

There's no question that in my lifetime, the contrast between what I called private affluence and public squalor has become very much greater.

Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.

It is precisely through falling prices that the fruits of increased productivity and economic growth are spread throughout the market economy.

Indeed, as soon as he took office, Senator Mitch McConnell announced that his top priority was to deny President [Barack] Obama a second term.

The economy is better than the one President [Barack] Obama inherited, and unemployment is lower, but the unemployment rate gap remains large.

The image of the frontier is probably one of the oldest images of mankind, and it is not surprising that we should find it hard to get rid of.

It is freedom that makes this the greatest country in the world. And it is freedom that so frequently keeps me on the optimistic side of life.

Everybody has some information. The function of the markets is to aggregate that information, evaluate it and get it incorporated into prices.

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.

Once you run current-account deficits, you depend on the kindness of strangers. This might be the beginning of the end of the American empire.

When I was a young man, an individual with one million dollars was very rich. Anyone with a few millions more was considered richer than rich.

Far from the West having caused the poverty in the Third World, contact with the West has been the principal agent of material progress there.

If you lived with a roommate as unstable as this economic system, you would’ve moved out or demanded that your roommate get professional help.

The tradition of Chicago price theory is a good one, and it is a low-tech methodology that tries to apply simple economic theory to the world.

The happiest lot for a man, as far as birth is concerned, is that it should be such as to give him but little occasion to think much about it.

Scarcity is a captivating book, overflowing with new ideas, fantastic stories, and simple suggestions that just might change the way you live.

Quite simply, promotions are not just functions of ability, values, or the numbers you hit, but also rest critically on how you are perceived.

When I was a graduate student, estimating and interpreting distributed lags topped the agenda of macroeconomists and other applied economists.

The curse of the intelligentsia is their ability to rationalize and re-define. Ordinary people, lacking that gift, are forced to face reality.

Intellectuals may like to think of themselves as people who "speak truth to power" but too often they are people who speak lies to gain power.

Even though I’m pro-globalization, I have to say thank God for the anti-globalization movement. They’re putting important issues on the agenda.

Across the continent, political divisions are deepening. For all of these reasons, the specter of a euro zone collapse has not been dispatched.

Technology gives us the facilities that lessen the barriers of time and distance - the telegraph and cable, the telephone, radio, and the rest.

The investors who generate big returns over five years, the guys they write books about, are supposed to keep winning, right? Well, they don't.

Through the inevitable mismanagement of resources and goods at the disposal of the state, all forms of collectivism lead eventually to tyranny.

We're in a pretty tumultuous world, and there's a lot of uncertainty. Treasurys are where people go as one of the few safe havens in the world.

Share This Page