It is important to reclaim for humanity the ground that has been taken from it by various arbitrarily narrow formulations of the demands of rationality

My proposal that Fed governors should signal their commitment to public service by wearing Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts has so far gone unheeded.

It's not coincidence that the U.S. is in last place in the world in terms of corporate tax rate. It's because our system is set up to block tax reform.

My first summer in college I worked in a fruit fly lab where I had two jobs: dissect the fruit fly larvae brains and incinerate the old tubes of flies.

The creation of new capital always... releases... labor. Its actual effect [though] is not to make jobs scarce, but to free men's labor for other jobs.

We shall never prevent the abuse of power if we are not prepared to limit power in a way which occasionally may prevent its use for desirable purposes.

While admirers of capitalism, we also to a certain extent believe it has limitations that require government intervention in markets to make them work.

One can relish the varied idiocy of human action during a panic to the full, for, while it is a time of great tragedy, nothing is being lost but money.

Some politicians fear the burden that migrants will impose on local communities and taxpayers. Others fear extremists masquerading as genuine refugees.

The life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in any of the other advanced industrial countries.

Global demand for dollars has supplanted demand for manufactured goods and services, resulting in multilateral trade deficits and loss of jobs at home.

... the fouling of the nest which has been typical of man's activity in the past on a local scale now seems to be extending to the whole world society.

I received my high school baccalaureate diploma in Latin and Science in 1928, then my two baccalaureate diplomas in Mathematics and Philosophy in 1929.

See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true.

If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies.

Pick at random any three letters from the alphabet, put them in any order, and you will have an acronym designating a federal agency we can do without.

The most important ways in which I think the Internet will affect the big issue is that it will make it more difficult for government to collect taxes.

A crackpot theory. Instead of saying labor's exploited, as Marx did, Kelso says capital's exploited. It's worse than Marx. It's Marx stood on its head.

Money is the general medium of exchange. It is the thing for which all other goods are traded, the means of final payment for such goods on the market.

Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world's resources. A vegetarian diet is better.

You have to eventually nationalize US banks, you have to take the problem by the horns. In my view actually most of the US banking system is insolvent.

The very concept of law that protects us from tyranny has been lost. No longer the people's shield, law has become a weapon in the hands of government.

The problem isn't that people don't understand how good things are. It's that they know, from personal experience, that things really aren't that good.

Charles Darwin got his theory, his notion of natural selection, evolution, and so did its independent discoverer, Alfred Wallace, from reading Malthus.

When it comes to my health, I would rather my doctor base her decisions on science rather than what she, or some lawyer, thinks will stand up in court.

It makes sense for social scientists to become more involved in policy because many of society's most challenging problems are, in essence, behavioral.

It is not that pearls fetch a high price because men have dived for them; but on the contrary, men have dived for them because they fetch a high price.

Marketers know that if people you respect - perhaps laughably including entertainers and athletes - say they like a product, you're more likely to buy.

People don't like it, but inevitably we need to think about both the costs and the benefits of health care. We cannot avoid the financial consequences.

[Con] men have long known . . . that their job is not to convince skeptics but to enable the gullible to continue to believe what they want to believe.

Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress.

To say that the whole of the industrial experience of Europe and America just shows the rewards of exploiting the Third World is a gross simplification.

I don't think baseball can abandon the Miami market. If MLB does let that market go vacant, I think it'll be one of the biggest mistakes they ever made.

Income inequality is troubling because, among other things, it means that many people in our society don't have the opportunities to advance themselves.

Now that I'm a civilian again, I can once more comment on economic and financial issues without my words being put under the microscope by Fed watchers.

Sociotropic voters with biased economic beliefs are more likely to produce severe political failures than are selfish voters with rational expectations.

What we have ignored is what citizens can do and the importance of real involvement of the people versus just having somebody in Washington make a rule.

We are more likely to cheat if we see others doing so. We tend to conform to accepted norms of reasonable behaviour, rather than adhere to strict rules.

And who will deny that a world in which the wealthy are powerful is still a better world than one in which only the already powerful can acquire wealth?

There is a big logical jump between acknowledging the destructive nature of hyperinflation and arguing that the lower the rate of inflation, the better.

A crucial responsibility of any central bank is to control inflation, the average rate of increase in the prices of a broad group of goods and services.

SOME YEARS, like some poets,and politicians and some lovely women, are singled out for fame far beyond the common lot, and 1929 was clearly such a year.

I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago.

Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement.

The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.

If you are trying to favor the unions by having more rigid labor market and keeping wages very high, you could be blocking people from getting new jobs.

Geniuses and prophets do not usually excel in professional learning, and their originality, if any, is often due precisely to the fact that they do not.

Trump will fail even in his proclaimed goal of reducing the trade deficit, which is determined by the disparity between domestic savings and investment.

Share This Page