The massive corruption common in so many developing countries would be quite impossible if Western countries did not provide convenient opportunities to ship ill-gotten funds out of the country. It wouldn't make much sense for a ruler to store in his basement large quantities of stolen cash in his own country's currency. A corrupt ruler wants to be able to keep this money safe and to be able to spend it. And for this, he needs to convert it into a Western currency and store it in a bank abroad, where it can also earn investment returns and be bequeathed to his heirs.

Large multinational corporations, often acting through their industry lobbies, exert a powerful influence on the formulation of domestic rules and on their application - but their influence on supranational institutional design is even larger because it faces practically no opposition there.

The state should never have instituted and enforced legal property rights in persons, and should not have been in the business of returning runaway slaves to their "rightful owners." The whole institution of property in human beings was an unjust social institution and should not have been maintained in existence. It is this sort of thought that I'm appealing to at the supranational level.

Companies are actually much better than governments and other bureaucracies at organizing in a holistically efficient way the extremely complex path from the examination of molecules all the way to the delivery of medicines to patients. Already in the conception and selection of research projects, companies would anticipate all the challenges down the line that they will need to overcome in order to achieve actual health impact. Bureaucratic organizations, by contrast, are notoriously bad at this sort of optimizing.

Feudalism is an economic system where a few people own all the land and the others have no option but to be serfs on such a feudal estate. We now condemn feudalism. We condemn not merely the feudal lords but we condemn the whole structure of rules that sustained feudalism. I am asking people to think similarly about the world economy.

By using general consumption PPPs, the World Bank is, in effect, saying to the poor: "Sure, you cannot buy as much food as the dollar value we attribute to your income would buy in the United States. But then you can buy much more by way of services than you could buy with this PPP equivalent in the United States." But what consolation is this? The poor do not buy services - they are services, on their luckier days.

In the United States there are only two exceptions: banks have to report deposits they suspect to be related to either terrorism or drug trafficking. But if your funds derive from trafficking women and children for sexual exploitation, for example, or from illegal arms trafficking or any other illegal activity, then banks in the US are legally free to accept your money and are not required to report your deposit to the authorities.