A friend from India told me that a countryman of his said: "I want to go to America. I want to see a country where poor people are fat."

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

[Con] men have long known . . . that their job is not to convince skeptics but to enable the gullible to continue to believe what they want to believe.

Tolerating imperfections is the price of freedom.

People in the political world have every incentive to say things that lead voters away from a clear economic understanding of issues. What has happened more and more is that organized groups have more and more reasons to say things that don't make any economic sense.

Trade-offs have been with us ever since the late unpleasantness in the Garden of Eden.

Compassion is the use of public funds to buy votes