There is a common tendency to ignore the poor or to develop some rationalisation for the good fortune of the fortunate.

Milton Friedman’s misfortune is that his economic policies have been tried.

If people are hungry, ill-clad, unsheltered or diseased, nothing is so important as to remedy their condition.

The problem of the modern economy is not a failure of a knowledge of economics; it's a failure of a knowledge of history.

Let’s begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes - indeed, deletes - the role of wealth in the economic and social system. And it sheds the adverse connotation going back to Marx. Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity.

Money is what fueled the industrial society. But in the informational society, the fuel, the power, is knowledge. One has now come to see a new class structure divided by those who have information and those who must function out of ignorance. This new class has its power not from money, not from land, but from knowledge.

It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.