There was a time when we the U.S. had completely unrestricted immigration, when anybody could come to these shores and the motto on the Statue of Liberty had some real meaning. This was a country of hope and of promise for immigrants and their children, and as many as a million immigrants a year came in 1906 and '07 and '08. By 1914, roughly a third of the population was foreign-born or the immediate descendants of foreign-born...The fact that year after year hundreds of thousands of people left the countries of Europe to come to this country was persuasive evidence that they were coming to improve their lot, not to worsen it.
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Consider Social Security. The young have always contributed to the support of the old. Earlier, the young helped their own parents out of a sense of love and duty. They now contribute to the support of someone else's parents out of compulsion and fear. The voluntary transfers strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken those bonds.
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There is one and only one social responsibility of business-to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.
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The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
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I strongly urge the voters of Colorado to reject Referendum C, or any action that would suspend Colorado's Taxpayers Bill of Rights. I strongly favor the continued and uninterrupted use of TABOR, including it's so called ratchet mechanism. The ratchet is one of the best features of TABOR. It is the only thing that will reduce out-of-control government spending.
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There is no free lunch.
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If, for example, existing government intervention is minor, we shall attach a smaller weight to the negative effect of additional government intervention. This is an important reason why many earlier liberals, like Henry Simons, writing at a time when government was small by today's standards, were willing to have government undertake activities that today's liberals would not accept now that government has become so overgrown.
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Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
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I'm in favour of legalising drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.
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So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no they do not.
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The economic miracle that has been the United States was not produced by socialized enterprises, by government-union-industry cartels or by centralized economic planning. It was produced by private enterprises in a profit-and-loss system. And losses were at least as important in weeding out failures as profits in fostering successes. Let government succor failures, and we shall be headed for stagnation and decline.
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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.
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Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.
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Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
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I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible.
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The price works so well, so efficiently, that we are not aware of it most of the time.
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The power to do good is also the power to do harm.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself
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Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.
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Governments never learn. Only people learn.
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History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
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A society that puts equality... ahead of freedom will end up with neither.
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History suggests that Capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom.
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The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
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