Raising the minimum wage and lowering the barriers to union organization would carry a trade-off - higher unemployment. A better idea is to have the government subsidize low-wage employment. The earned-income tax credit for low-income workers - which has been the object of proposed cuts by both President Clinton and congressional Republicans - has been a positive step in this direction.

Default is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

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

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.

The United States in particular and the West in general should be feeling a little embarrassed about all that lecturing we did to the Third World.

The raw fact is that every successful example of economic development this past century ... has taken place via globalization.

Friedrich Hayek is not an important figure in the history of macroeconomics.