Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else.

Your money does not cause my poverty. Refusal to believe this is at the bottom of most bad economic thinking.

Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the "right" to education, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle.

Humans have trouble with economics, as you may have noticed, and not just because economic circumstances sometimes cause them to starve. Humans seem to have an innate inability to pay attention to economic principles.

Never fight an inanimate object.

We have no one to blame for the Kennedys but ourselves. We took the Kennedys to heart of our own accord. And it is my opinion that we did it not because we respected them or thought what they proposed was good, but because they were pretty. We, the electorate, were smitten by this handsome, vivacious family. . . . We wanted to hug their golden tousled heads to our dumpy breasts.

The idea of capitalism is not just success but also the failure that allows success to happen.