"Weighing benefits against costs is the way..." - Quote by Thomas Sowell

“Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.”

“One of the most basic and pervasive social processes is the sorting and labeling of things, activities, and people... Sorting and labeling processes involve a trade-off of costs and benefits. In general, the more finely the sorting is done, the greater the benefits - and the costs... Sorting and labeling, whether of people or of things, is a sorting and labeling of probabilities rather than of certainties.”

“The government has brought on the housing problem, partly by these very low interest rates, which encouraged many people to go way out on a limb. They've brought it on by highly restrictive building policies, which have caused housing prices to skyrocket artificially. And they've brought it on by the Community Reinvestment Act, which presumes that politicians are better able to tell investors where to put their money than the investors themselves are. When you put all that together, you get something like what you have.”

“The one conclusive argument that has at all times discouraged people from drinking a poison is not that it kills but rather that it tastes bad.”

“If you don't make mistakes you can't make decisions.”

“Follow your feelings. If it feels right, move forward. If it doesn't feel right, don't do it.”

“No single piece of macroeconomic advice given by the experts to their government has ever had the results predicted.”

“In the next economic downturn there will be an outbreak of bitterness and contempt for the supercorporate chieftains who pay themselves millions. In every major economic downturn in US history the villains have been the heroes during the preceding boom.”

“An increase in the productivity of labour means nothing more than that the same capital creates the same value with less labour, or that less labour creates the same product with more capital.”