Central planning doesn't work. A little bit of it is a drag. A lot is fatal.

That is the problem with age and wisdom—it merely shows you how helpless you are. The wiser you become, the more you learn to keep your mouth shut, until eventually the grave silences you forever.

Only simple ideas can be held by large groups of people. Commonly held ideas are almost always dumbed down until they are practically lies... and often dangerous ones. Once vast numbers of people have come to believe the lie, they adjust their own behavior to bring themselves into sync with it, and thereby change the world itself. The world, then, no longer resembles the one that gave rise to the original insight. Soon, a person's situation is so at odds with the world as it really is that a crisis develops, and he or she must seek a new metaphor for explanation and guidance.

Central planning doesn't work. A little bit of it is a drag. A lot is fatal.

Printing up extra money - with no backing - used to be the sort of thing only counterfeiters did. Now it is done by the central bankers and Treasury Secretaries themselves. They don't apologize for it. They don't hang their heads and contemplate blowing their brains out. Instead, they're proud of it... announcing that they 'saved civilization,' or some such claptrap.

Both the liberal and the conservative are in agreement: it is all very well to let the people alone, but only if they do what you want them to do.

You don't get what you want from investing, you get what you deserve.