Economist Quotes

“An e-mail from a reader says that liberals like to take the moral high ground, even though their own moral relativism means that there is no moral high ground.”

“Few of the great tragedies of history were created by the village idiot, and many by the village genius.”

“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.”

“Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like the national interest.”

“To say that being non-judgmental is better than being judgmental is itself a judgment, and therefore a violation of principle.”

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

“Too often the past has been twisted to fit the visions and agendas of the present.”

“It doesnt matter what you do if you dont do what matters. If you do what matters it doesnt matter what you do.”

“The big problem in the long process of dumbing down the schools is that you can reach a point of no return. How are parents who never received a decent education themselves to recognize that their children are not getting a decent education?”

“Envy is always referred to by its political alias, 'social justice.”

“For society as a whole, nothing comes as a "right" to which we are "entitled." Even bare subsistence has to be produced-and produced at a cost of heavy toil for much of human history. The only way anyone can have a right to something that has to be produced is to force someone else to produce it for him. The more things are provided as rights, the less the recipients have to work and the more others have to carry their load.”

“Anyone who does not understand the utter cynicism of politics does not understand politics.”

“All that makes earlier times seem simpler is our ignorance of their complexities.”

“Capitalism is not an 'ism.' It is closer to being the opposite of an 'ism,' because it is simply the freedom of ordinary people to make whatever economic transactions they can mutually agree to.”

“Do all children have some inherent right to live in America if they have done nothing wrong? If not, then why should the children of illegal immigrants have such a right?”

“Securities based on risky mortgages are what toppled financial institutions but it was the government that made the mortgages risky in the first place, by making home-ownership statistics the holy grail, for which everything else was to be sacrificed, including commonsense standards for making home loans.”

“Many bad policies are simply good policies taken too far.”

“We need laws written by people who have confronted life in the real world, not in the sheltered world of trust fund recipients of the insulated cocoon of academia.”

“Envy plus rhetoric equals "social justice.".”

“If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.”

“No one pushed harder than Congressman Barney Frank to force banks and other financial institutions to reduce their mortgage lending standards, in order to meet government-set goals for more home ownership. Those lower mortgage lending standards are at the heart of the increased riskiness of the mortgage market and of the collapse of Wall Street securities based on those risky mortgages.”

“People who talk incessantly about "change" are often dogmatically set in their ways. They want to change other people.”

“Knowledge can be enormously costly, and is often scattered in widely uneven fragments, too small to be individually usable in decision making. The communication and coordination of these scattered fragments of knowledge is one of the basic problems- perhaps the basic problem- of any society.”

“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.”

“Nothing could be more jolting and discordant with the vision of today's intellectuals than the fact that it was businessmen, devout religious leaders and Western imperialists who together destroyed slavery around the world. And if it doesn't fit their vision, it is the same to them as if it never happened.”