I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.
When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.
Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.
Racism does not have a good track record. It's been tried out for a long time and you'd think by now we'd want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management.
The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.
The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better.
Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.
The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.
Intellect is not wisdom.
Since this is an era when many people are concerned about 'fairness' and 'social justice,' what is your 'fair share' of what someone else has worked for?
Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
Bailing out people who made ill-advised mortgages makes no more sense that bailing out people who lost their life savings in Las Vegas casinos.
Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.
Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.
There are only two ways of telling the complete truth--anonymously and posthumously.
If politicians stopped meddling with things they don't understand, there would be a more drastic reduction in the size of government than anyone in either party advocates.
If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else's expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves.
We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.
Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.
What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?
Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.
The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.
It doesn't matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.
Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.
If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago and a racist today.
Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options
When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.
Don't you get tired of seeing so many "non-conformists" with the same non-conformist look?
The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy.
If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.
It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
The New York Times’ long-standing motto, “All the News That’s Fit to Print” should be changed to reflect today’s reality: “Manufacturing News to Fit an Ideology.
Everyone may be called "comrade," but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades.
The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.
As an entrepreneur in India put it: 'Indians have learned from painful experience that the state does not work on behalf of the people. More often than not, it works on behalf of itself.
Age gives you an excuse for not being very good at things that you were not very good at when you were young.
Mystical references to 'society' and its programs to 'help' may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.
Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument.
Whatever we wish to achieve in the future, it must begin by knowing where we are in the present- not where we wish we were, or whee we wish others to think we are, but where we are in fact.
For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.
What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.
One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.
There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.
The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten.
No matter how much people on the left talk about compassion, they have no compassion for the taxpayers.
Liberals seem to assume that, if you don’t believe in their particular political solutions, then you don’t really care about the people that they claim to want to help.
The only people I truly envy are those who can play a musical instrument and those who can eat anything they want without gaining weight.
To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by “society”.
Clearly, only very unequal intellectual and moral standing could justify having equality imposed, whether the people want it or not, as Dworkin suggests, and only very unequal power would make it possible.
Differences in habits and attitudes are differences in human capital, just as much as differences in knowledge and skills—and such differences create differences in economic outcomes.
It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of our own ignorance.
I am so old that I can remember when other people’s achievements were considered to be an inspiration, rather than a grievance.
The next time you see a bum leaving drug needles in a park where children play or urinating in the street, you are seeing your tax dollars at work and the end result of the vision of the anointed.
What is called an educated person is often someone who has had a dangerously superficial exposure to a wide spectrum of subjects.
Free-loading at emergency rooms—mandated by government—makes being uninsured a viable option.
Have you gone crazy, Lefty?” “No. On the contrary, I have become educated.” “Sometimes that’s worse, these days.
The essence of bigotry is denying others the same rights you claim for yourself. Green bigots are a classic example.
Minimum wage laws appear to give low-income workers something for nothing—and appearances are what count in politics. Realities can be left to others, so long as appearances get votes.
Suppose you are wrong? How would you know? How would you test for that possibility?
In short, numbers are accepted as evidence when they agree with preconceptions, but not when they don’t.
As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is kill.
…the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?
It would be very heard, for example, a basketball owner, no matter how racist he was, to try to operate without Blacks. It would be suicidal.
Teachers who pander to minority students by turning their courses into rap sessions and ethnic navel-gazing exercises capture their interest and allegiance.
Much of what is taught in our schools and colleges today seeks to break down traditional values, and replace them with more fancy and fashionable notions, of which “a duty to die” is just one.
As George J. Stigler said of some of his fellow Nobel Laureates, they “issue stern ultimata to the public on almost a monthly basis, and sometimes on no other basis.
Languages as Asians, who outnumber them nearly four to one.121 Linguistic diversity is not only a sign of cultural isolation and fragmentation, it contributes to the barriers
Government “planning” is not an alternative to chaos. It is a pre-emption of other people’s plans.
Failure is part of the natural cycle of business. Companies are born, companies die, capitalism moves forward. Fortunemagazine{115}
Isolation is a recurring factor in poverty and backwardness around the world, whether that is physical isolation or cultural isolation, for any number of particular reasons
