To include freedom in the very definition of democracy is to define a process not by its actual characteristics as a process but by its hoped for results. This is not only intellectually invalid, it is, in practical terms, blinding oneself in advance to some of the unwanted consequences of the process.

For society as a whole, nothing comes as a "right" to which we are "entitled." Even bare subsistence has to be produced-and produced at a cost of heavy toil for much of human history. The only way anyone can have a right to something that has to be produced is to force someone else to produce it for him. The more things are provided as rights, the less the recipients have to work and the more others have to carry their load.

Everyone may be called "comrade," but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades.

Contrary to the vision of the left, it was the free market which produced affordable housing - before government intervention made housing unaffordable.

Hyperinflation can take virtually your entire life's savings, without the government having to bother raising the official tax rate at all.

Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.

All too often, we do smart things only after exhausting every conceivable dumb thing we could have done.