Believers in aristocracy and socialism share a faith in centralized rule, in rule by command rather than by voluntary cooperation.
At the end of World War II, we had wage and price controls. Under wartime inflationary conditions, many employers found it difficult to recruit employees. To get around the limitations of wage control...
What kind of society isn't structured on greed? The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm capitalism is that kind of a system.
The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.
Fundamentally, there are only two ways of co-ordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion - the technique of the army and of the modern totali...
A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the forc...
A fourth argument, one that was made by Alexander Hamilton and continues to be repeated down to the present, is that free trade would be fine if all other countries practiced free trade but that so lo...
Only people have incomes and they derive them through the market from the resources they own, whether these be in the form of corporate stock, or of bonds, or of land, or of their personal capacity.
No arbitrary obstacles should prevent people from achieving those positions for which their talents fit them and which their values lead them to seek. Not birth, nationality, color, religion, sex, nor...
I have been enormously impressed by the role that pure chance plays in determining our life history. I was reminded of some famous lines of Robert Frost:Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorry I...
Every special group around the country tries to get its hands on whatever bits and pieces it can. The result is that there is hardly an issue on which government is not on both sides. For example, in...
Currently, the only widely available alternative to a local public school is a parochial school. Only churches have been in a position to subsidize schooling on a large scale and only subsidized schoo...
I) Social benefits. When we first started writing about higher education, we had a good deal of sympathy for the first justification. We no longer do. In the interim we have tried to induce the people...
7) The impact on public schools. It is essential to separate the rhetoric of the school bureaucracy from the real problems that would be raised. The National Education Association and the American Fed...
There is all the difference in the world, however, between two kinds of assistance through government that seem superficially similar: first, 90 percent of us agreeing to impose taxes on ourselves in...
The threat to public schools arises from their defects, not their accomplishments. In small, closely knit communities where public schools, particularly elementary schools, are now reasonably satisfac...
The power to do good is also the power to do harm; those who control the power today may not tomorrow; and, more important, what one man regards as good, another may regard as harm.
So far as we know, no pollster has asked the public, Are you getting your money’s worth for the more than 40 percent of your income being spent on your behalf by government? But
One reason inflation is so destructive is because some people benefit greatly while other people suffer; society is divided into winners and losers. The winners regard the good things that happen to t...
One feature of the voucher plan that has aroused particular concern is the possibility that parents could and would add on to the vouchers. If the voucher were for, say, $1,500, a parent could add ano...