 Both free speech rights and property rights belong legally to individuals, but their real function is social, to benefit vast numbers of people who do not themselves exercise these rights. |
| The real minimum wage is zero. |
| What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long. |
| The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way. |
| The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best. |
| The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them. |
| 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. |
| The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers. |
| The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive. |
| If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today. |
| It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it. |
| Liberals seem to assume that, if you don't believe in their particular political solutions, then you don't really care about the people that they claim to want to help. |
| The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites. |
| Actually lowering the cost of insurance would be accomplished by such things as making it harder for lawyers to win frivolous lawsuits against insurance companies. |
| Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated. |
| The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite. |
| Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good. |
| Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision. |
| Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it. |
| The real goal should be reduced government spending, rather than balanced budgets achieved by ever rising tax rates to cover ever rising spending. |
