The United States of America was a pirate nation for the first one hundred years of its existence, ripping off the patents and trademarks of the imperial European powers it had liberated itself from by...

I don’t worry about GDP. Not when there are so many other combinations of letters to be concerned with.

The idea of any blood-thirsty pirate (Mexican President Diaz) sitting on a throne and reaching across the border to tromp on our Constitution makes my blood boil.” — Mother Jones

Ban privileges. The rules of the game should be the same to all players, regardless of their size, location, or any other criteria

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society’s legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit...

We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests,...

Under capitalism the common man enjoys amenities which in ages gone by were unknown and therefore inaccessible even to the richest people. But, of course, these motorcars, television sets and refrigerators do not make a...

Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought...

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives...

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

Government should never be able to do anything you can’t do. If you can’t steal from your neighbor, you can’t send the government to steal for you.

… toxic derivatives were underpinned by toxic economics, which, in turn, were no more than motivated delusions in search of theoretical justification; fundamentalist tracts that acknowledged facts only when they could be accommodated to the...

Sometime I’m going to do an essay called ‘The Virtues of Amateurism’ for all of those people who wish they earned their living in the arts. The market kills more artistic people than anything else....

Economics is not a discipline that comes to correct answers – economies are too complex.

Oil may run out, liquidity may dry up, but as long as ink flows freely, the next chapter of Life will continue to be written.

Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue.

You eat the wealthy, sir, and it will be your last meal.

It is true that the virtues which are less esteemed and practiced now–independence, self-reliance, and the willingness to bear risks, the readiness to back one’s own conviction against a majority, and the willingness to voluntary...

This is perhaps as good a place as any to point out that what distinguishes many reformers from those who cannot accept their proposals is not their greater philanthropy, but their greater impatience. The question...

Even if we could grow our way out of the crisis and delay the inevitable and painful reconciliation of virtual and real wealth, there is the question of whether this would be a wise thing...

Machinery which is not used is not capital.

Good writing, and this is especially important in a subject such as economics, must also involve the reader in the matter at hand. It is not enough to explain. The images that are in the...

There are sufficient resources in the world for the needs of everybody, but not enough for the greed of even a significant minority.

One of the most damaging myths of our time is that poor countries live in poverty because of a conspiracy of the rich countries, who arrange things so as to keep them underdeveloped, in order...

If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.

Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

And more than the quality of its institutions, what distinguishes a developed country from a developing one is the degree of consensus in its politics, and thus its ability to take actions to secure a...

99 percent of all statistics only tell 49 percent of the story.

From this failure to expunge the microeconomic foundations of neoclassical economics from post-Great Depression theory arose the “microfoundations of macroeconomics” debate, which ultimately led to a model in which the economy is viewed as a...

Programmers have a saying: “garbage in, garbage out.

[Economics] is all about observing the world with genuine curiosity and admitting that it is full of mysteries

[I]n communism, you’d threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.

Money is a public good; as such, it lends itself to private exploitation.

On Earth one of the things that a large proportion of the locals is most proud of is this wonderful economic system which, with a sureness and certainty so comprehensive one could almost imagine the...

At this point we can finally see what’s really at stake in our peculiar habit of defining ourselves simultaneously as master and slave, reduplicating the most brutal aspects of the ancient household in our very...

The trouble is, nobody knows exactly how the world really works. We are all fallible people with limited knowledge. It is only through Biblical revelation from the One who knows how the world really works...

recession.” No matter how many millions of jobs are lost, how much debt our country accrues, or how many years the stagnation drags on, it’s not a depression until the dogmatic media officially declares it...

What I’m saying to you this morning is that Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the Kingdom of Brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of Communism nor...

The real problems of our planet are not economic or technical, they are philosophical. The philosophy of unbridled materialism is being challenged by events.

Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.

There is only a certain amount of wealth in the world, this thinking goes. Economics is a matter of acquiring and allocating, not creating. This was the view of the world’s smartest people, all top...

The social function of economic science consists precisely in developing soundeconomic theories and in exploding the fallacies of vicious reasoning. In the pursuit ofthis task the economist incurs the deadly enmity of all mountebanks and...

Anyone who objects to any government whatsoever as a form of socialism ought not to pull that socialist lever in their home, the one that makes their waste disappear in a whirlpool into the socialized...

I became convinced that the advanced industrial countries, through international organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the World Bank, were not only not doing all that they could...

History, practical experience, common sense and economic theory all agree: economic competition is probably one of the greatest ideas humans ever came up with. When people compete to achieve the same goal, great things seem...

Experience has taught us that material wants know no natural bounds, that they will expand without end unless we consciously restrain them. Capitalism rests precisely on this endless expansion of wants. That is why, for...

Recent evidence confirms that retail prices of essential consumer goods in poor countries are not appreciably lower than in the United States or Western Europe. In fact, with deregulation and “free trade”, the cost of...

Exchange, fair or unfair,always presupposes and includes the rule of the bourgeoisie.

Feminists know that if women are paid equal wages for equal work, women will gain sexual as well as economic independence. But feminists have refused to face the fact that in a woman-hating social system,...

Savings, remember, is the prerequisite of investment.