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.

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.

Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.

Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.

How do you hold down government spending?

Germany cannot get out of the euro. What it has to do, therefore, is make the economy more flexible - to eliminate the restrictions on prices, on wages and on employment; in short, the regulations that keep 10 percent of the German workforce unemployed.

The invisible hand in politics operates in the opposite direction to the invisible hand in the market.