The more power government has to provide things, the more power it has to dictate terms.

The state is an organization of mere mortals who, by one dubious method or another, have been allowed to don the mantle of political legitimacy and to command obedience on pain of imprisonment even of those who never consented to the preposterous arrangement.

The government's coercive taxing power necessarily creates two classes: those who create and those who consume the wealth expropriated and transferred by that power.

Government interference with the economic process represents a substitution of political for consumer objectives.

Today, the people who would use guns to violate rights have little trouble getting them, while those who would use them to defend their rights have increasing trouble getting them. ... Gun control is in effect a subsidy for criminals.

Perhaps the deterioration of American education is illustrated by the high correlation between the number of years a person has attended school and his inability to understand the words "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." It is more likely, though, that those who interpret the Second Amendment to preclude an individual right to own guns are driven by their political agenda. Whichever the case, they do themselves no credit when they tell us that a simple, elegant sentence means the opposite of what it clearly says.

We think of prices as simply the notation of how much we must pay for things. But the price system accomplishes far more than that. Hundreds of millions of people buying and selling, and abstaining from buying and selling, generate a system of signals - prices to producers and consumers about relative scarcities and demand. Through this system, consumers can convey to producers their subjective priorities and entrepreneurs can invest accordingly.