One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.

---

Inflation is taxation without legislation.

---

A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.

---

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.

---

When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.

---

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.

---

The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.

---

A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.

---

You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.

---

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

---