Capitalism believes that its remit is exclusively to make maximum short-term profits.

Battering down solar cells on the roofs of Wal-Marts in California. I think that will be some of the highest-return investments that anyone ever makes.

Capitalism believes that its remit is exclusively to make maximum short-term profits.

I like to be right. I try not to miss the big ideas, forget the little ones, and try to get them right. End of job description.

We live on a finite planet. We have finite resources, and we're running out of good, arable land.

Think how weird profit margins are: We've got high unemployment and financial crises - and world record profit margins. People think the American market is very cheap. We don't. The market quite incorrectly gives full credit to today's earnings.

Everyone asks about gold. This is the irony: just as Jim Grant tells us (correctly) that we all have faith-based paper currencies backed by nothing, it is equally fair to say that gold is a faith-based metal. It pays no dividend, cannot be eaten, and is mostly used for nothing more useful than jewelry. I would say that anything of which 75% sits idly and expensively in bank vaults is, as a measure of value, only one step up from the Polynesian islands that attached value to certain well-known large rocks that were traded.