As an economist, whenever I hear the word shortage I wait for the other shoe to drop. That other shoe is usually price control.

The biggest and most deadly 'tax' rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits - food stamps, housing subsidies and the like - if their income goes up.

Any policy is a success by sufficiently low standards and a failure by sufficiently high standards.

Relevance is not something you can predict. It is something you discover after the fact.

An inmate in a Florida prison wrote to agree with me on the availability of guns, saying that a 'criminal can and will get a stolen gun faster than you can get your car washed.' He also points out that many criminals prefer guns gotten illegally, since they will be harder to trace.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

Some people say that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. But the runaway taxes of our time are the price we pay for being gullible.