We economists don't know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can't sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly you'll have a tomato shortage. It's the same with oil or gas.

Economic freedom is ... an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.

There is no place for government to prohibit consumers from buying products the effect of which will be to harm themselves.

You can travel from one end of the industrialized world to the other and almost the only people you will find engaging in backbreaking toil are people who are doing it for sport. To find people whose day's toil has not been lightened by mechanical invention, you must go to the non-capitalist world.

The only reason free markets have a ghost of a chance is that they are so much more efficient than any other form of organization.

If, for example, existing government intervention is minor, we shall attach a smaller weight to the negative effect of additional government intervention. This is an important reason why many earlier liberals, like Henry Simons, writing at a time when government was small by today's standards, were willing to have government undertake activities that today's liberals would not accept now that government has become so overgrown.

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.