Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations.

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The government doesn't have any money. The only power it has is to take from some and give to others.

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Inflation is taxation without legislation.

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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 force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.

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The key insight of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: 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.

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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 cents per pound. Instantly you'll have a tomato shortage. It's the same with oil or gas.

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If you pay people not to work and tax them when they do, don't be surprised if you get unemployment.

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When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union - like public housing in the United States - look decrepit within a year or two of their construction.

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Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own.

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If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.

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