The vast majority of Americans, at all coordinates of the economic spectrum, consider themselves middle class; this is a deeply ingrained, distinctly American cognitive dissonance.

The economics we need is of the “seminar room” variety, not the “rule-of-thumb” kind. It is an economics that recognizes its limitations and caveats and knows that the right message depends on the context. The...

We’re not so different, you and I. Sure, we may have different religious beliefs, political outlooks, sexual orientations, economic viewpoints, and artistic/literary/culinary tastes, but deep down we both want the same thing: To be loved...

The American share of the crisis began with grossly improper mortgages provided to wholly unqualified borrowers, all directly caused and encouraged by government distortion of and interference in the market. The government’s market deformation and...

Rogue economics is a sort of umbrella under which we find the criminal economy, the illegal economy, but also those gray areas, gray areas where there is not a proper regulation, where there is not...

There’s a way that money is freedom, but it isn’t money, it’s that money stands for having a choice.

The worst continued to worsen. What looked one day like the end proved on the next day to have been only the beginning. Nothing could have been more ingeniously designed to maximize the suffering, and...

Free markets are the real people’s revolution.

The law-abiding citizen by his labor serves both himself and his fellow man and thereby integrates himself peacefully into the social order. The robber, on the other hand, is intent, not on honest toil, but...

A limited state with free economic systems is the soil where the liberty tree blossoms.

the euro, it seems, is stuck in a political no man’s land – trapped between two opposing world views. And the battleground is not economics, but ethics.

The capital amassed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through various forms of slave economy is still in circulation, said De Jong, still bearing interest, increasing many times over and continually burgeoning anew.

To cut 1930s jobless, FDR taxed corps and rich. Govt used money to hire many millions. Worked then; would now again. Why no debate on that?

There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.

Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but...

100 trillion is 100 followed by 12 zeroes

Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it. -Andrew Young, author, civil rights activist, US congressman, mayor, and UN ambassador (b. 1932)

Our aim was not to create profit, but jobs,’ Sanchez Gordillo explained to me. This philosophy runs directly counter to the late-capitalist emphasis on ‘efficiency’ – a word which as been elevated to almost holy...

it was Greenspan who through some excessive deregulation prepared the monetary ground for the rise of the subprime mortgage companies: a lending market that specialises in high-risk mortgages and loans.’Innovation’, said Greenspan in April 2005,...

Our faith in freedom does not rest on the foreseeable results in particular circumstances but on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than for the bad.

All love is socioeconomic. It’s the gradients in status that make arousal possible.

If nonsatiety were the natural state of human nature then aggressive want-stimulating advertising would not be necessary, nor would the barrage of novelty aimed at promoting dissatisfaction with last year’s model. The system attempts to...

As consumers and as voters we can say ‘no’ to rogue economics and demand regulation.

Nowadays… deals are transactional rather than personal. Instead of placing your faith in a person, you get lawyers to write safeguards into the contract. This is an historic shift from a trust economy to a...

The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads.

The General Theory was not truly revolutionary at all but merely old and oft-refuted mercantilist and inflationist fallacies dressed up in shiny new garb, replete with newly constructed and largely incomprehensible jargon.

The decline of geography in academia is easy to understand: we live in an age of ever-increasing specialization, and geography is a generalist’s discipline. Imagine the poor geographer trying to explain to someone at a...

Social security isn’t a ponzi scheme. It’s not bankrupting us. It’s not an outrage. It is working.

There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress.

The government is indeed an institution, but “the market” is nothing more than an option for each individual to chose among numerous existing institutions, or to fashion new arrangements suited to his own situation and...

The individualist insists that drastic depressions are the result of credit inflation; (not excessive savings, as the Keynesians would have it) which at all times in history has been caused by direct government action or...

1. Stop blaming China We taught them how to do what they are doing2. Take responsibility – purchase consciously, purchase less, don’t go for lowest possible price3. Follow good business ethics, it’s a two way...

How could a large land empire thrive and dominate in the modern world without reliable access to world markets and without much recourse to naval power?Stalin and Hitler had arrived at the same basic answer...

As UC Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong put it to me:You get famine if the price of food spikes far beyond that of some people’s means. This can be because food is short, objectively. This...

International business, once allowed to stalk uncontrolled, killed the local, the small, the quirky.

the value of a pace,” or competitor, shaves twenty to thirty seconds off the time of a mile. To rigorously test the value of human proximity, he got forty children to compete at spinning fishing...

But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence...

It is not difficult to deprive the great majority of independent thought. But the minority who will retain an inclination to criticize must also be silenced….Public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed...

If we try to run the economy for the benefit of a single group or class, we shall injure or destroy all groups, including the members of the very class for whose benefit we have...

Printing currency for foreigners to buy is the best racket a government can get into.

Careers increasingly come with a reboot button, and companies that realize this early possess a competitive talent advantage

We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you’re looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs...

Now here’s somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he’s caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it’s absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be...

Inequality of wealth and incomes is an essential feature of the market economy. It is the implement that makes the consumers supreme in giving them the power to force all those engaged in production to...

Facing a deteriorating economy and a weakening hold over the populace, the Iraqi state under Saddam Hussein opted to revitalize tribal leaders and conservative practices as a means of stabilizing state power; those conservative practices...

Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn’t get anything right.

Funny how in a material world full of pundits and economists obsessed with assets and liabilities -personally, economically and globally – few speak about the greatest of all these…YOU.

I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.

The use of market values and technology as a social barometer has devalued the worth of individuals, rendered irrelevant the quality of their lives, and stunted their creativity.

Raising interest rates is voo-doo. You can’t deal with a global system problem by trying to solve it with this.