Thomas Jefferson, the leading Enlightenment figure in the United States, along with Benjamin Franklin, who took exactly the same view, argued that dependence will lead to "subservience and venality", and will "suffocate the germs of virtue". And remember, by dependence he meant wage labor, which was considered an abomination under classical liberal principles.

I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.

I am a child of the Enlightenment. I think irrational belief is a dangerous phenomenon, and I try to consciously avoid irrational belief. On the other hand, I certainly recognize that it's a major phenomenon for people in general, and you can understand why it would be. It does, apparently, provide personal sustenance, but also bonds of association and solidarity and a means for expressing elements of one's personality that are often very valuable elements. To many people it does that. In my view, there's nothing wrong with that.

I had two spinster aunts who were seamstresses, and of course unemployed in the 1930s, but the union gave them a life. They had a couple of weeks in the country for a union installation and they had educational programs and all sorts of things. There was a life, you know, a real community.

Procurement is a major technique of state subsidy.

Today's Democrats are pretty much what used to be called moderate Republicans a generation ago.

Take pandemics. There could easily be a severe pandemic. A lot of that comes from something we don't pay much attention to: Eating meat. The meat production industry, the industrial production of meat, uses an immense amount of antibiotics.We're now running out of antibiotics that deal with the threat of rapidly mutating bacteria. A lot of that just comes from the meat production industry. Well, do we worry about it? Well, we ought to be.