• A Part of the Truth Can Be More Misleading than All of a Lie
  • Philosophers have long debated the intersections of religion and science.  While religion and science may not mix well, they both mix poorly with politics.
  • Prinicples can be an important guiding light.  They can also be a convenient place to hide, an excuse from taking any action, making any decision or making any compromise.
  • Those brilliant thinkers who seek a unified theory of human behavior, often pursued with a delusional sense of mathematical certainty,  are inevitably humbled by the dual human abilities of judgment and change.
  • It is much easier to rely on the magic candidate to save us than to discuss the changes in our lives that must happen to restore sanity to our economy.  This reliance on experts and magic leaders is just the flip side of the conspiracy theorists who want to find demons rather than solutions.
  • We are disappointed in our government because we have come to depend on them to solve every problem.  They cannot do it.  We have similarly become disappointed in our schools because we want them to solve larger  social and cultural problems which are beyond their scope.
  • First they came for the light bulbs and I was silent. Then they came for my toilets that could accomplish their assigned task in a single flush, and I said nothing.  Now they have come for my guitars, and I am really,  really pissed.
  • … the more progressive our tax system is the more our government depends on the fortunes of the wealthy to provide the revenues to run the country.  Recessions affect the wealthy more and thus become more severe.  There is an irony that a less progressive tax system would lead to a much more stable revenue stream.
  • Success is knowing what worked yesterday. What worked at one time in one set of circumstances may not work in a different environment.
  • Government runs on political self interest. The market runs on economic self interest. Both will have failures. The benefit of market approaches is that economic self interest corrects mistakes quicker.  The answer to government failure is often more government.  Failure is thus perpetuated until drastic changes, frequently revolution, is invoked.  Our experiment has delivered drastic changes and survived drastic shocks largely without revolution.
  • Intellectuals and ‘experts’ tend to the complex.  The more complex the potential problem the greater the chance that regulation may make it worse.  The more complex the regulatory structure the greater the likelihood that unforeseen events will lead to regulatory failure.  Add the two together and the chance of systemic failure is almost assured.
  • For a half century we have depended on the Fed to cover for the reckless fiscal policies of Congress.  This financial collapse has tapped out the ability of the fed to meet its dual mandate of stable money and low unemployment.   Instead of fulfilling a single mission well (sound money) it is proving ineffective at both missions.
  • There is a tendency to correct temporary problems in the private sector, or to avoid the pain of a market correcting itself,  by transferring power to the public sector. But without the discipline of the market, this often causes temporary problems to become permanent.  While it is painful when the market readjusts to excesses and reallocation, in the longer run it clears the debris to restart growth.  The market decentralizes power, consistent with the idea of federalism.
  • Economic planning by political entities not only creates a centralization of power that is dangerous to individual freedoms, as Hayek warns; it also creates a stagnant economy. A strong economy is a free economy.
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