Europe is often held up as a cautionary tale, a demonstration that if you try to make the economy less brutal, to take better care of your fellow citizens when they're down on their luck, you end up killing economic progress. But what European experience actually demonstrates is the opposite: social justice and progress can go hand in hand.

Social Security is a social insurance program - it is not designed to be the same thing as a 401(k).

The fact is that the two years or so after 9/11 were a terrible time in America – a time of political exploitation and intimidation, culminating in the deliberate misleading of the nation into the invasion of Iraq. It’s probably worth pointing out that I’m not saying anything now that I wasn’t saying in real time back then, when Bush had a sky-high approval rating and any criticism was denounced as treason. And there’s nothing I’ve done in my life of which I’m more proud.

In fact, I'd say that the sources of the economy's expansion from 2003 to 2007 were, in order, the housing bubble, the war, and - very much in third place - tax cuts.

Middle-class societies don't emerge automatically as an economy matures, they have to be CREATED through political action.

You really have to go searching desperately to find any contemporary examples of good, old-fashioned runaway inflation.

The economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.