In effect, the poor person is a rich person left to fend for him or herself, without the support of institutions that help the person to take ‘good’ decisions.

A guidance counselor who has made a fetish of security, or who has unwittingly surrendered his thinking to economic determinism, may steer a youth away from his dream of becoming a poet, an artist, a...

The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.

It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little. Whenyou pay too much, you lose a little money – that’s all. When you paytoo little, you sometimes lose everything, because the...

The shortcomings of economics are not original error but uncorrected obsolescence. The obsolescence has occurred because what is convenient has become sacrosanct. Anyone who attacks such ideas must seem to be a trifle self-confident and...

This plea comes from the bottom of my heart. Every friend of freedom, and I know you are one, must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into...

American way of life.

Armed with the new right to sell their products back to host societies, they can bleed both producing and buying populations at the same time. That is why under new international “free trade” agreements private...

The only true and sustainable prosperity is shared prosperity.

I have a dream, there will be critical point in the future,where economics and technology will negate each other.

As Thorstein Veblen correctly surmised over a century ago, the failure of economics to become an evolutionary science is the product of the optimizing framework of the underlying paradigm, which is inherently antithetical to the...

It’s not that gays and diversity equal high technology. But if your culture is not such that it can accept difference, and uniqueness and oddity and eccentricity, you will not get high tech industry.

All of us—employers, parents, schools, government agencies, and interns themselves—are complicit in the devaluing of work, the exacerbation of social inequality, and the disillusionment of young people in the workplace that are emerging as a...

We must arm ourselves with patience and wisdom and listen to the poor what they want. This is the best way to avoid the trap of ignorance, ideology and inertia on our side.

We used to think God made us in His image, and that meant we were special, until science told us we just evolved that way because it suited a landscape of trees and savannas. That’s...

In the same essay, Said (who is reviewing Peter Stansky and William Abrams, co-authors obsessed with the Blair/Orwell distinction) congratulates them on their forceful use of tautology:‘Orwell belonged to the category of writers who write.’...

There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay...

Economist should be spelled echonomist, because they all repeat each other.

If everyone in America started mailing empty boxes, we could boost productivity, profitability, and employment. Think like a politician.

In 1980 candidate Reagan asked whether we were better off than we had been 4 years earlier. In 1992 we will be asked whether we expect our children to live better than we do.

I am duty bound to make this plea, but I want to say, with all due respect to the governor here, that I doubt seriously that he will do — cannot do — anything. And...

Like casinos, large corporate entities have studied the numbers and the ways in which people respond to them. These are not con tricks – they’re not even necessarily against our direct interests, although sometimes they...

The energy and daring is to resist the noes, until the final yes has been achieved.

The global economy is a doomsday machine that must be stopped and reprogrammed.

Most of us have no sympathy with the rich idler who spends his life in pleasure without ever doing any work. But even he fulfills a function in the life of the social organism. He...

Government succeeds by failing.

There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term ‘conservatism’ can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of...

Clearly, only very unequal intellectual and moral standing could justify having equality imposed, whether the people want it or not, as Dworkin suggests, and only very unequal power would make it possible.

Some say it’s wrong to profit from the misfortune of others. I ask my students whether they’d support a law against doing so. But I caution them with some examples. An orthopedist profits from your...

Regular crises perpetuate the past by reinvigorating cycles which started long ago. In contrast, (capital-C) Crises are the past’s death knell. They function like laboratories in which the future is incubated. They have given us...

Goods are traded, but services are consumed and produced in the same place. And you cannot export a haircut. But we are coming close to exporting a haircut, the appointment part. What kind of haircut...

The economics profession advances by one confusing financial disaster at a time.

Even Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” occasionally needs a slap on the wrist.

We have always known that heedless self interest was bad morals, we now know that it is bad economics.

Their job as leader was not to solve the problem – the president really has little control over the economy – but to convince the public not only that he has a plan but that...

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product...

To try to cure unemployment by inflation rather than by adjustment of specific wage-rates is like trying to adjust the piano to the stool rather than the stool to the piano.

While the invisible hand looks after the private sector, the invisible foot kicks the public sector to pieces.

Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this,...

What these men represented was not ‘The West’ but what was for this century a relatively new kind of monied class in America, a group devoid of social responsibilities because their ties to any one...

Indeed.

Economic experts tell us that the women of America spend 80 per cent of the national income, and the largest part of this expenditure is made for the necessities and the small luxuries of life.

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who...

This points to a nagging and important question about free-market ideologues: Are they ‘true believers’, driven by ideology and faith that free markets will cure underdevelopment, as is often asserted, or do the ideas and...

When people encounter the free market and they recoil or react negatively to it, they’re merely confessing that voluntaryism, trade and negotiation are foreign and threatening to them, which tells you everything about how tragically...

America isn’t breaking apart at the seams. The American dream isn’t dying. Our new racial and ethnic complexion hasn’t triggered massive outbreaks of intolerance. Our generations aren’t at each other’s throats. They’re living more interdependently...

Economics also has to become a fundamentally monetary discipline—from the consideration of how individuals make market decisions through to our understanding of macroeconomics. The myth of “the money illusion” (which can only be true in...

Now, it’s true that some of the protesters are oddly dressed or have silly-sounding slogans, which is inevitable given the open character of the events. But so what? I, at least, am a lot more...

If you bake a cupcake, the world has one more cupcake. If you become a circus clown, the world has one more squirt of seltzer down someone’s pants. But if you win an Olympic gold...

The technical developments of almost every form of wealth [e.g., oil, minerals] are the forebears of Big Business; and Big Business, directly or indirectly, is the immediate cause of War.