It is most attractive about the US to people and countries with wealth is that it can provide security, insurance really, against political instability. Nobody is afraid that the money they place in the US is at risk of expropriation or of in some other way being taken away. For this safety, the wealth holders of the world are willing to accept a lower rate of return.

The essential notion of a capitalist society ... is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force.

Every friend of freedom... must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.

Congress can raise taxes because it can persuade a sizable fraction of the populace that somebody else will pay

I do not believe there is a natural resource economics. I believe there is good economics and bad economics.

If you look at the balance sheet, the US is heavily in debt. If you look at the income account - the amount of interest the US pays abroad - it is almost exactly equal to the amount of interest that it receives from abroad. American assets held abroad are earning a higher rate of return than foreign assets held here.

The true test of any scholar's work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next 25 or 50 years.