There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

In the conventional wisdom of conservatives, the modern search for security is regularly billed as the greatest single threat to economic progress.

In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.

I've been writing a book called The Economics of Innocent Fraud. I published part of it already in The Progressive ("Free Market Fraud," January 1999). But I've been interrupted these last few months. It deals with all of the things we do, in an innocent way, to cover up the truth.

Economics exists to make astrology look respectable.

It has been the acknowledged right of every Marxist scholar to read into Marx the particular meaning that he himself prefers and to treat all others with indignation.