Quotes About Economics

The single greatest invention man ever conceived in the dollar bill, because I don't want to know the conversion rate for coconuts.

When you're rich, you want a Republican in office.

So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted.

You've got to be frugal. If you want to make one peso and you spent two, you'll never make it. You must be very stupid if you don't know what you should save on.

They [the Reagan Administration] want to put street criminals in jail to make life safer for the business criminals. They're against street crime, providing that street isn't Wall Street.

Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens.

All wealth consists of desirable things; that is, things which satisfy human wants directly or indirectly: but not all desirable things are reckoned as wealth.

Whoever wants to reach socialism by any other path than that of political democracy will inevitably arrive at conclusions that are absurd and reactionary both in the economic and the political sense.

Twenty-five years earlier there had not been more than five men in the United States worth as much as five million dollars, and there were less than twenty who were worth a million. Now, however, the New York Tribune would report that there were several hundred men in the city of New York alone who were worth at least a million, and a number who were worth at least twenty million.

Someone who would tax them half to death but who might just keep them alive long enough to pay the taxes – a lot like modern governments, in fact.

Karma theory is a spiritual philosophy used to explain and maintain the economic status of Asia.

We've switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics - trying to play a serious part in the world - to a culture that's really entertainment-based.

At what point do we admit that the NFL's true economic function is to channel our desire for athletic heroism into an engine of nihilistic greed?

This, of course, is the big dance of capitalism: how to keep morality from gumming up the gears of profit, how to convince people to make bad decisions without seeing them as bad.

When economic tribalism dominates the political system, civilization reverts to a system of fiefdoms.

it allows us to go to Walmart and more easily "ad-match

The flat tax would be so simple, you could fill it out on a post card. A post card that would say, in effect, having a wonderful time; glad most of my money is here.

The ultimate lesson of history— and of this book—is that no nation has ever gotten rich by eroding the value of its money.

Since I've become a central banker, I've learned to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said.

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.

When people don't pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.

A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything.

In the United States especially, politics and economics don't mix well. Politicians have all sorts of reasons to pass all sorts of laws that, as well-meaning as they may be, fail to account for the way real people respond to real-world incentives.

Substantially fewer films will be produced over the next year or two. And a significant portion of the production costs of the reduced slate will be borne by hedge funds and other investment groups.