The great virtue of free enterprise is that it forces existing businesses to meet the test of the market continuously, to produce products that meet consumer demands at lowest cost, or else be driven from the market. It is a profit-and-loss system. Naturally, existing businesses generally prefer to keep out competitors in other ways. That is why the business community, despite its rhetoric, has so often been a major enemy of truly free enterprise.

The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.

I think in some ways it would make more sense to have as a poverty level a relative concept and say, the level of poverty is that level of income or that level of consumption below which 10 percent of the people now are.

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true.

My interest in political philosophy was rather casual until I met Hayek.

The most important ways in which I think the Internet will affect the big issue is that it will make it more difficult for government to collect taxes.