Sublime

either immediately or ultimately every dollar of government spending must be raised through a dollar of taxation.

There is an iron law in economics: extremely good and extremely bad circumstances rarely stay that way for long because supply and demand adapt in hard-to-predict ways.

the more ordinary people are able to produce, the more powerful people can confiscate.

The very notion of making things affordable misses the key point of a market economy. An economy exists to make trade-offs, and a market economy makes the terms of those trade-offs plain with price tags representing the relative costs of producing different things. To have politicians arbitrarily change the price tags, so that prices no longer repr

“That which is large enough for the rich to covet,” said Wayne, drawing up his head, “is large enough for the poor to defend.”

There is reasonably strong evidence for what Thaler calls No Free Lunch—it is difficult (although not literally impossible) for any investor to beat the market over the long-term. Theoretically appealing opportunities may be challenging to exploit in practice because of transaction costs, risks, and other constraints on trading. Statistical pattern

Goodness is an acquired taste.

An economy of favours and obligations doesn’t work when large numbers of strangers try to cooperate. It’s one thing to provide free assistance to a sister or a neighbour, a very different thing to take care of foreigners who might never reciprocate the favour. One