This paper was one of my digressions into abstract economics.

… a intervenção é um fenómeno historicamente permanente; sempre existiram formas de intervenção na economia por parte do Estado. O que tem variado é a intensidade e as modalidades dessa intervenção.

They ask – “How much money is too much money?”The answer always is – “A little more!

Americans were happy to celebrate their super-rich and, at least sometimes, worry about their poor. But putting those two conversations together and talking about economic inequality was pretty much taboo.

Have you ever witnessed the anger of the good shopkeeper, James Goodfellow, when his careless son has happened to break a pane of glass? If you have been present at such a scene, you will...

It is one of the saddest spectacles of our time to see a great democratic movement support a policy which must lead to the destruction of democracy and which meanwhile can benefit only a minority...

For every dollar that is spent on the (boondoggle) bridge a dollar will be taken away from taxpayers. If the bridge costs $1,000,000 the taxpayers will lose $1,000, 000. They will have that much taken...

Be they pharaohs or freeholders, barons or farmers, landowners have been the most capable, most intrepid, and most assertive members of civilized society.

Veblen called it the price-system. Mills called it the Power Elite. It’s probably no more than ninety-nine people who don’t know what they are doing. They’re involved in high finance. Fascinating form of gambling.

But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple.

do something.” The high-minded reformers experience a glow of triumph and turn their attention to new causes. The interested parties go to work to make sure that the power is used for their benefit. They...

It is true that some secluded intellectuals in their esoteric circles talk differently. They proclaim the priority of what they call eternal absolute values and feign in their declamations—not in their personal conduct—a disdain of...

In the long run we are all dead.

The world’s most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it...

It takes a pillage.

Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It’s an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles.

An essential pedagogic step here is to relegate the teaching of mathematical methods in economics to mathematics departments. Any mathematical training in economics, if it occurs at all, should come after students have at the...

There is nothing as dangerous as an economist who only knows economics except the moral philosopher who knows no economics.

Look, America is no more a democracy than Russia is a Communist state. The governments of the U.S. and Russia are practically the same. There’s only a difference of degree. We both have the same...