Japan has introduced fiscal stimulus five times in the past seven or eight years and each time it's been a failure and that's not a surprise. Fiscal stimulus is not stimulating in and of itself.

Italy may well be the main problem. It has benefited most from the euro by having been able to get the euro interest rate instead of what otherwise would have been its own. That would be much higher because Italy has been accumulating so much debt. In the past, Italy has inflated away its debt. The virtue of the euro is that Italy can't do it alone. A tight ECB policy wouldn't permit that to happen again.

Politicians will always spend every penny of tax raised and whatever else they can get away with.

The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.

There is one and only one social responsibility of business - to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.

What is not forbidden in Sweden, is obligatory.

If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies.