Obviously the commercial news media tries to get you worked up and terrified so you'll buy products that they're advertising.

I was a bit of a troubled kid growing up, let's put it that way. I didn't take pleasure in hard work.

In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

Obviously, people who commit crimes should be punished. Even people who steal socks and 'Snow White' videos should probably do time if they have priors, especially serious priors. But the punishment has to fit the crime, and the standard has to be the same for everyone.

America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial.

It's come around to that point of view at the end of a long evolutionary process, in which the rule of law has slowly been replaced by giant idiosyncratic bureaucracies that are designed to criminalize failure, poverty, and weakness on the one hand, and to immunize strength, wealth, and success on the other.

Washington politicians basically view the People as a capricious and dangerous enemy, a dumb mob whose only interesting quality happens to be their power to take away politicians' jobs... When the government sees its people as the enemy, sooner or later that feeling gets to be mutual. And that's when the real weirdness begins.