This is a world inhabited not by people who have to be persuaded to believe but by people who want an excuse to believe.

In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated.

Meetings are held because men seek companionship or, at a minimum, wish to escape the tedium of solitary duties. They yearn for the prestige which accrues to the man who presides over meetings, and this leads them to convoke assemblages over which they can preside. Finally, there is the meeting which is called not because there is business to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. Such meetings are more than a substitute for action. They are widely regarded as action.

It was not hard to persuade people that the market was sound; as always in such times they asked only that the dispiriting voices of doubt be muted and that there should be tolerably frequent expressions of confidence.

World War II revealed two of the enduring features of the Keynesian Revolution. One was the moral difference between spending for welfare and spending for war. During the Depression very modest outlays for the unemployed seemed socially debilitating, economically unsound. Now expenditures many times greater for weapons and soldiers were perfectly safe. It's a difference that still persists.

People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.

It's much easier to point out the problem than it is to say just how it should be solved.