Quotes About Policy

Any candidate who suggests that too many people are going to jail for too long will be targeted in an opponent's television ads as "soft on crime" and booted out of office. The result is that the United States imprisons far more people than it should, with disproportionate harm falling on African American communities who have been stripped of large numbers of men. A

While Trump has cultivated a reputation for law and order, he is viscerally uninterested in evidence-based policy that would distinguish effective crime-prevention measures from useless tough talk.

Violent crime is a solvable problem.

The top five countries that still execute people in significant numbers form an unlikely club: China and Iran (more than a thousand apiece annually), Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. As in other areas of human flourishing (such as crime, war, health, longevity, accidents, and education), the United States is a laggard among wealthy democracies.

It makes little sense to make tens of millions of poor Americans pay more for clothing to save tens of thousands of jobs in the apparel industry.

Here is Eisner's one-sentence summary of how to halve the homicide rate within three decades: "An effective rule of law, based on legitimate law enforcement, victim protection, swift and fair adjudication, moderate punishment, and humane prisons is critical to sustainable reductions in lethal violence."32 The adjectives effective, legitimate, swift, fair, moderate, and humane differentiate his advice from the get-tough-on-crime rhetoric favored by right-wing politicians.

But proving that incarceration deters people (as opposed to incapacitating them) is easier said than done, because the statistics at any time are inherently stacked against it.

Mass incarceration, even if it does lower violence, introduces problems of its own. Once the most violent individuals have been locked up, imprisoning more of them rapidly reaches a point of diminishing returns, because each additional prisoner become less and less dangerous, and pulling them off the streets makes a smaller and smaller dent in the violence rate.

And countries that combine free markets with more taxation, social spending, and regulation than the United States (such as Canada, New Zealand, and Western Europe) turn out to be not grim dystopias but rather pleasant places to live, and they trounce the United States in every measure of human flourishing, including crime, life expectancy, infant mortality, education, and happiness.

El ideal del progreso tampoco debería confundirse con el movimiento del siglo XX para rediseñar la sociedad al antojo de los tecnócratas y los planificadores, que el politólogo James Scott denomina «alto modernismo autoritario».

I love trade. I'm a free trader, 100 percent. But we [the USA] need smart people making the deals, and we don't have smart people making the deals.

I think Americans should have a policy of love. That should be the foreign policy, love. Export Love.

Liberals force lower middle-class families, who love their children, to dispatch them to ghetto schools dominated by gangs of fatherless boys bearing knives.

Ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors to bullets.

I always wondered about that: if you can create money out of thin air, why not do that far more than is being done already?

We must make immigration a legal, orderly process to eliminate this issue, not further criminalize it.

Claro está que cuando se ha eliminado la estabilidad laboral de quienes enseñan se puede controlar con más facilidad lo que enseñan.

The reduced sense of responsibility and the absence of effective volition in turn explain the ordinary citizen's ignorance and lack of judgement in matters of domestic and foreign policy which are if anything more shocking in the case of educated people and of people who are successfully active in non-political walks of life than it is with uneducated people in humble stations.

The U.S. incarceration rate is the world's highest and some nine to ten times that of many European countries. Almost 1 in 100 American adults is behind bars.61 Some U.S. states spend as much on their prisons as they do on their universities.

The idea that people could get along fine with just markets, and no government, turned out to rest upon a version of what economists call the "compositional fallacy.

Frankly, I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private individuals.

A leader has to know how the system functions - not just the system of government but the whole social and economic system, including business, the unions, and the universities.

It is not the government's purpose to make a profit the way a company does, because a company doesn't have to give a damn about the unemployed poor or provide services that are non-commercial by definition.

The United Nations had to be the cornerstone of our foreign policy.