Joel Miller Quotes

With its brutal excesses and reliance on snitches and finks as informants, I don't think it's far off-kilter to describe the modern-day drug war as oddly similar to the Salem witch trials.

Markets are nimble and efficient, gathering the collective but disbursed intelligence of the economy's players and communicating up-to-the-minute realities of prices, product availability, etc. Government is typically cumbersome, plodding, and slow.

Instead of doing more badly, government should focus on doing less well.

As government increases in quantity, our lives decrease in quality.

The more government does, the greater chance that its efforts will be tilted toward a particular group's good, instead of the common good.

The only way to effectively secure the common good is for the government to remain small.

Like some great swelling river, the powers of the federal government have today breached their constitutional levees and spilled into countless areas of life never anticipated by the founders.

Bureaucracies typically move slowly, clumsily, and without much regard for the wants and needs of the people they supposedly serve.

To best serve the public happiness, government shouldn't do things it cannot do well - anymore than Wal-Mart should provide goods and services that people don't like.

The government doesn't create wealth of its own; it can only take it from some and distribute it to others or dictate particular public uses of private resources.

Think about the difference between how your local gas station and congressman respond to a spike in oil prices. One has the price placard outside changed to reflect the reality of the market within hours. The other sends out a press release, tries to organize a hearing, and at the end of amount accomplishes nothing. Meanwhile, the gas station has already made at least thirty additional adjustments to the realities of the market while your politico fails to get anything more than easy media.

Advocacy groups, politicians, and bureaucrats use the government to advance their private good instead of the common good.

Money spent in complying with a regulation cannot be spent again on marketing or product research.

Political changes and reforms do not usually favor the general populace. They benefit those who are positioned to best organize and advocate for their policies.

Markets respond not to political pressures channeled through various committees, subcommittees, lobbies, and special interests but to the immediacies and exigencies of the economy - in other words, what's happening now.

Today, the law is a crazy quilt of provisions and clauses that very often have little to do with securing general happiness but instead are designed to secure the particular happiness of various advocacy groups, politicians and bureaucrats.

Markets help people pursue their happiness more efficiently and effectively. Because they are so effective, markets provide benefits right here and right now, even while government is busy batching the protection of happiness.

Every day Big Government heaps demands and restrictions upon businesses that sink some enterprises, cause others to direct resources away from serving customers and instead toward jumping through hoops of lawyers and regulators, and prevent other operations from ever getting off the ground.