"Why, then, should we have to lower our living standards? What is the mysterious source of the economic loss? If productivity is increasing, why should we sacrifice services and wages?"

“Keynes, like Freud and Marx, deserves to be read in the original, not through the glosses of his lesser disciples.”

“When laissez-faire creates instability, the move to a freer market can be something less than pure gain.”

“In practice, a good deal of the outcomes produced by the market reflect nothing more than luck - good or bad.”

“In America, we build public housing by creating lucrative inducements to private developers, and then wax indignant at the public waste.”

“By default, we have created a "system" of nursing-home care for the aged in which middle-class people pay exorbitant rates to for-profit nursing-home entrepreneurs - and then when private resources are consumed and the patient qualifies as a pauper, the nursing home begins billing Medicaid. This is precisely the antithesis of social citizenship; instead of the poor being accorded the dignity associated with the middle class, equality of treatment is achieved by making the middle class undergo pauperization.”

“The economic illusion is the belief that social justice is bad for economic growth.”