The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.
It is often maintained that while a let-alone, limited government policy was feasible in sparsely settled nineteenth-century America, government must play a far larger, indeed dominant, role in a mode...
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...
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...
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.
We economists don't know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can't sell tomatoes for more than two...
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...
In the modern world, tariffs and similar restrictions on trade have been one source of friction among nations. But a far more troublesome source has been the far-reaching intervention of the state int...
Here, too, we tend to be schizophrenic. We would all like to see government spending go down, provided it is not spending that benefits us. We would all like to see deficits reduced, provided it is th...
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...
To the despair of every economist, it seems almost impossible for most people other than trained economists to comprehend how a price system works. Reporters and TV commentators seem especially resist...
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.
The majority does rule. But it is a rather special kind of majority. It consists of a coalition of special interest minorities. The way to get elected to Congress is to collect groups of, say, 2 or 3...
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...