Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.

I'm a plain soap kind of guy.

Corruption, embezzlement, fraud, these are all characteristics which exist everywhere. It is regrettably the way human nature functions, whether we like it or not. What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum. No one has ever eliminated any of that stuff.

Cash is available and we should use that in larger amounts, as is necessary, to solve the problems of the stress of this.

It seems superfluous to constrain trading in some of the newer derivatives and other innovative financial contracts of the past decade. The worst have failed; investors no longer fund them and are not likely to in the future.

The need for values is inbred. Their content is not.

If we allow terrorism to undermine our freedom of action, we could reverse at least part of the palpable gains achieved by postwar globalization. It is incumbent upon us not to allow that to happen.