"Crime wouldn't pay if the government ran it." - Anonymous
"The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn't endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or compassion." - Saul Alinsky
"In a creepy way, like a veterinarian who doesn't like puppies, Paul Krugman is an economist who neither likes nor trusts markets." - Steve Antler
"Bill Clinton got tons of credit for the good economy of the past eight years, despite the fact that his total contribution consisted of payments to defense lawyers". - Dave Barry
"See, when the Government spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of Taxpayers, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs." - Dave Barry
"The federal budget surplus got so huge that experts believe it could take Congress as long as 18 months to blow the entire thing on comically unnecessary pork-barrel projects such as the Museum of Ketchup". - Dave Barry
"The Democrats seem to basically be nice people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery. They're the kind of people who would stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I'd be reluctant to trust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy." - Dave Barry
"The nation's criminals are becoming so incompetent that pretty soon they will need some kind of federal subsidy to stay in business." - Dave Barry
"Trying to study Macro without understanding Micro is like trying to study philosophy without understanding logic. Of course, quite a lot of people do this, which accounts for the awful state of modern day philosophy." - Boffo
"Evidently what the people-in-need are asking for is a lot of federal projects named after Senator Byrd. Some items funded by taxpayers -- but still somehow named after "Robert C. Byrd" -- are: The Robert C. Byrd Highway; the Robert C. Byrd Locks and Dam; the Robert C. Byrd Institute; the Robert C. Byrd Life Long Learning Center; the Robert C. Byrd Honors Scholarship Program; the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope; the Robert C. Byrd Institute for Advanced Flexible Manufacturing; the Robert C. Byrd Federal Courthouse; the Robert C. Byrd Health Sciences Center; the Robert C. Byrd Academic and Technology Center; the Robert C. Byrd United Technical Center; the Robert C. Byrd Federal Building; the Robert C. Byrd Drive; the Robert C. Byrd Hilltop Office Complex; the Robert C. Byrd Library; the Robert C. Byrd Learning Resource Center; the Robert C. Byrd Rural Health Center. And then it got late, and I had to stop researching. But it appears that every slab of concrete in West Virginia is named after Bob Byrd." - Ann Coulter
"The liberal's solution to a monopoly is invariably to create an even bigger monopoly by turning it over to the government. Not surprisingly, the only experiences nearly as unpleasant as commercial air travel are those run exclusively by the government -- the biggest monopoly of all. If you had to get up tomorrow morning and get a passport, a driver's license or a lamp, which would you dread most?" - Ann Coulter
"Derbyshire’s Law: The quality of any product or service varies in inverse proportion to the political power wielded by those labor unions to which the producers or service providers belong." - John Derbyshire
"If an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another." - Milton Friedman
"Keynes was wrong on just about everything, and his followers are wrong on absolutely everything." - Milton Friedman
"Antitrust laws were written to protect consumers, not competitors. If Microsoft is to fail, let it be because we failed to innovate, not because our innovations were outlawed." - Bill Gates
"Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." - John Maynard Keynes, unable to realize that he was and is now a defunct economist
"Stiglitz's outlook is that markets are imperfect, but he is not. Where Marx offered dictatorship of the proletariat, Stiglitz would give us dictatorship of the Nobel Laureate. Between the two, we might be safer with Marx." - Arnold Kling
"Nader certainly did not have the background in economics to blithely write new policies, preventing trade and doubling the minimum wage without causing disastrous results. I went to his green party website and saw that he was advocating a $14 per hour minimum wage. With unemployment at its lowest, I could not believe he could advocate a move that would likely create depression-era levels of unemployment and small business bankruptcy. And if Nader was an unqualified economist, he was totally unacceptably inexperienced in the realm of foreign policy. He proposed shutting down most of our military. While many progressive people say that they would want this to happen, it is only the luxury of knowing it never will that allows them to feel this way. His candidacy was not based on anything real or substantive" - Tristin Laughter
"There is not, of necessity, any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life. The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself; then labors on his own account for awhile, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This is the just, and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way to all -- gives hope to all, and ... energy, and progress, and improvement of conditions to all." - Abraham Lincoln
"Keynes was never so orthodox a Keynesian as his latter-day followers." - Donald Luskin
"It stinks to be poor" - Newmark's First Law
"There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man's needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means." - Albert Jay Nock
"The free market is ugly and stupid, like going to the mall; the unfree market is just as ugly and just as stupid, except there is nothing in the mall and if you don't go there they shoot you." - P.J. O'Rourke
"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators." - P.J. O'Rourke
"As a matter of political economics, I believe that the high-tax, high-spending policies of the Democrats benefit nobody except a small class of elite parasites and a slightly larger one of welfare clients; the “bulk of the population” gets shafted, forced to pay the bill for redistributive programs that wind up doing net damage to society. Nor is there any reason, given that the Democrats now rely more on wealthy contributors than the Republicans, to credit the worn-out canard that Republicans are tools of the rich." - Eric S. Raymond
"Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his." - Ronald Wilson Reagan
"The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would steal them away." - Ronald Reagan
"This is a normal stage in the evolution of non-profits. They start out mission-driven, and after a while become institution-driven. Then fund-raising starts to drive the mission. Since they're never happy to just declare victory and disband (the March of Dimes is still around, after all), they often wind up at a far remove from where they started, positionally. What's more, because it lacks the market discipline of the for-profit sector, and the supervision that public companies face from securities regulators, etc., the nonprofit sector is probably subject to far more financial chicanery and mismanagement." - Glenn Harlan Reynolds
"This is my opinion, but the more money you have, the happier you are. I haven't reached the point where diminishing marginal utility is setting in. I don't even envision it happening." - Prof. David Rosenberg, Harvard Law
"No politician anywhere on the planet has ever actually created a rupee's worth of prosperity." - Louis Rukeyser
"I never knew I was underprivileged until I went to a sociology class at Brooklyn College." - Al Sharpton
"It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract."- Alan Shepherd
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinners but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages." - Adam Smith
"Much of what is called "social science" could more accurately be called perjury." - Thomas Sowell
"For Marx, capitalism functioned only by exploiting the proletariat. But the proletariat got richer and bought homes in the suburbs. So the next generation of Marxists turned their attention to "colonialism": capitalism functioned only by looting the West's imperial possessions. But the West decolonized in the Fifties and Sixties, and they didn't get any poorer, only the colonies did. So the Marxists invented "neo-colonialism": capitalism functioned by informally exploiting the nominally independent developing world. But the dramatically differing rates at which developing economies developed in Asia, Africa, and Latin America seemed to have little to do with external forces and a lot more to do with obvious local factors." - Marc Steyn
"New Mexico senator Jeff Bingaman is on CNBC talking about his new obesity bill. Rumors that the Senate will be recommending a diet of pork are unkind and unfair." - Andrew Stuttaford
"People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict." - Ludwig Von Mises