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

In the old days, land was important as the giver of all things. That period is gone now. Technology and brainpower are all that matters and yet conflicts over land, specially one like on the India-China border, that yields nothing, continue. This is a burden of ancient history that we continue to carry. If tomorrow there is settlement on planet Mars, we will begin to worry if others are interested.

Perhaps never before or since have so many people taken the measure of economic prospects and found them so favorable as in the two days following the Thursday [24th October 1929] disaster.

I was in charge of price controls in World War II and had a ceiling on overall prices. Everybody who was subject to general maximum price regulation wanted an exception and went to Congress to persuade a Congressman, or a group of people on the Hill, that I was being a menace to their industry.

[Franklin Delano] Roosevelt was the central world figure in the two great disasters of this century - the Great Depression and World War II. By contrast, JFK came in relatively peaceful, agreeable times.

The seminar in economic theory conducted by Hayek at the L.S.E. in the 1930s was attended, it came to seem, by all of the economists of my generation - Nicky Kaldor , Thomas Balogh, L. K. Jah, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, the list could be indefinitely extended. The urge to participate (and correct Hayek) was ruthlessly competitive.

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