When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.

Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery.

I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible. ... because I believe the big problem is not taxes, the big problem is spending.

Had drugs been decriminalized, crack would never have been invented and there would today be fewer addicts... The ghettos would not be drug-and-crime-infested no-man's lands... Colombia, Bolivia and Peru would not be suffering from narco-terror, and we would not be distorting our foreign policy because of it.

Every economist knows that minimum wages either do nothing or cause inflation and unemployment. That's not a statement, it's a definition.

Economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems.

Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?