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.

The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder,...

95% of economics is common sense

Debts are subject to the laws of mathematics rather than physics. Unlike wealth, which is subject to the laws of thermodynamics, debts do not rot with old age and are not consumed in the process...

Seen from that future time, when every commodity the human mind could imagine would flow from the industrial horn of plenty in dizzy abundance, this would seem a scanty, shoddy, cramped moment indeed, choked with...

Does a population have informed consent when that population is not taught the inner workings of its monetary system, and then is drawn, all unknowing, into economic adventures?

And one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a...

Occult Theft,–Theft which hides itself even from itself, and is legal, respectable, and cowardly,–corrupts the body and soul of man, to the last fibre of them. And the guilty Thieves of Europe, the real sources...

More die in the United States of too much food than of too little

We economists don’t know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can’t sell tomatoes for...

who is always right.

Minimum standards to promote workers’ wages, health and safety, to safeguard the community against pollution and degradation, and to ensure basic life goods for all as a basic contract for civil society was between 1945...

Overborrowing or overlending? Lenders encourage indebtedness because it is profitable. Developing country governments are sometimes even pressured to overborrow … Even without corruption, it is easy to be influenced by Western businessmen and financiers …...

This is the permanent tension that lies at the heart of a capitalist democracy and is exacerbated in times of crisis. In order to ensure the survival of the richest, it is democracy that has...

If only one person were perfectly informed there could never be a general crisis. But the only perfectly informed person is God, and he does not play the stock market.

Just as the church needs members with different skills, our world must have various forms of labor, interdependent and thus valuable. A world full of ministers would be without churches, bread for the Lord’s Supper,...

Socialism is politicized envy.

An item is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it

… economists recognize that, other things equal, cuts in tax rates reduce tax revenues in percentage terms by less than the tax-rate reductions. Similarly, tax-rate increases do not raise tax revenues by as much in...

When I applied to graduate school many years ago, I wrote an essay expressing my puzzlement at how a country that could put a man on the moon could still have people sleeping on the...

To me, the conclusion that the public has the ultimate responsibility for the behavior of even the biggest businesses is empowering and hopeful, rather than disappointing. My conclusion is not a moralistic one about who...

Failure to recognize the historical specificity of the bourgeois conception of rights and duties leads to serious errors. It is for this reason that Marx registers…a vigorous indictment of the anarchist Proudhon… Proudhon in effect...

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,...