Quotes of the day

The truth is that only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a standard or a status by which to criticise the state. They alone can appeal to something more holy than the gods of the city; the gods of the hearth.--G.K. Chesterton

Our own view is that the short-term stimulus from the legislation before Congress will be smaller per dollar spent than is expected by many others because the package tries to combine short-term stimulus with long-term benefits to the economy. Unfortunately, short-term and long-term gains are in considerable conflict with each other. Moreover, it is very hard to spend wisely large sums in short periods of time. Nor can one ever forget that spending is not free, and ultimately it has to be financed by higher taxes.--Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy

I think about the stimulus as an economist but I feel it as a father. Barack Obama is destroying my daughters’ future. It is like sitting there watching my house ransacked by a gang of thugs.--Arnold Kling

[Timothy Geithner] knows the problem is there, but is unwilling to face into the truth. He thinks we can't handle it. Reality is, we can handle the truth: it's he and his scared-out-of-their-minds Congresspeople that can't handle the truth. We need some different people making the big decisions. They appear too big and too important for our small-minded Congresspeople to make.--Roger Ehrenberg

What separated Paulson from the rest of the hedge fund crowd was his realization that nobody was able to value these complex securities. His advantage came when he was willing to admit that.--Gary Weiss

This study suggests that you can take an adolescent kid, say a 12 year old, ramp up the intensity of her intellectual life, and as a result of that experience, when she gives birth ten years later her child will have intellectual advantages it would not have otherwise had.--David Shenk