Much of economics isn't difficult, or rather, the difficulty is in cooking up arguments to "prove" that commonsense conclusions are wrong. The fact is that many commonsense conclusions are quite correct, and it takes a lot of education to get you to believe different.

We have for years been building a society in which everybody plunders everybody, and while we are weary of being plundered, we enjoy the plunder.

In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control, and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.[Pournelle's law of Bureaucracy]

The difference between Libertarian and Conservative is that Conservatives understand this, and know that unregulated capitalism will eventually end with human meat sold in market places, and slavery. Alas, many Conservatives think that everything has to be regulated and controlled.

A Dark Age is not just a period in which people no longer know how to do things. The real key is that people no longer remember that certain things can be done at all.

I have a big collection of quotation programs...In particular, I like MCR Software's Wisdom of the Ages, which has the best selection of relevant quotes I know.

The Aztecs believe they started up in what's now New Mexico, and wandered for 10,000 years before they got down into where they are now, in Mexico City. That's a weird legend.