I couldn’t help asking him once what he meant by coming here at all. “To make money, of course. What do you think?” he said, scornfully. Then he got fever, and had to be carried in a hammock slung under a pole.
-Marlow describing a fellow European in Heart of Darkness
Anyone who expects markets to restore a disturbed equilibrium instantaneously will be disappointed. People cannot discover the relevant changes, confirm and assess them, consider alternative arrangements of their affairs, and carry out those changes in an instant. The competent economist appreciates the necessity of patience in evaluating the market’s operation. Simply because the market does not appear to have reconfigured itself fully soon after a shock, we have no warrant to conclude that “the market doesn’t work anymore” or that “the market doesn’t work the way it used to.”
-Robert Higgs (ht: Econlog)
Don’t you realize? The next time you see sky, it’ll be over another town. The next time you take a test, it’ll be in some other school. Our parents, they want the best of stuff for us. But right now, they got to do what’s right for them. Because it’s their time. Their time! Up there! Down here, it’s our time. It’s our time down here. That’s all over the second we ride up Troy’s bucket.
-Mikey from Goonies
Even if they never got anything for it, it was cheap at that price. Without malice aforethought I had given them the best show that was ever staged in their territory since the landing of the Pilgrims! It was easily worth fifteen million bucks to watch me put the thing over.
– Charles Ponzi, on his scam over the people in Boston (Note, this was submitted by reader Charles T on November 10th, a month before Madoff came to light. I’m not saying he has a time machine, but there is a distinct possibility)
Jenny. I believe God made me for a purpose. But he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.
-Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire
[W]e do know something – at least abstractly – about the future. We know that other great crises will come. Whether they will be occasioned by foreign wars, economic collapse, or rampant terrorism, no one can predict with assurances. Yet in one form of another, great crises will surely come again… When they do, governments almost certainly will gain new powers over economic and social affairs… For those who cherish individual liberty and a free society, the prospect is deeply disheartening.
-Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.
Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
-Michael Crichton on Global Warming
“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
-James Collins outlining the “Stockdale Paradox”
“A bank is…a manufacturer of credit. The cornerstone of credit is confidence — confidence of men in men. A panic is a collapse of credit. It is an intensely human affair, and many of the determining influences are of a personal and confidential character, and very inadequately reflected in the cold figures of the bank statement.”
-E.W. Kemmerer (1911)
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.
-The Bailout Proposal
The real cost of government is measured by what government spends, not by the receipts labeled taxes. The goods and services it buys are not available for other use…Suppose government spends $400 billion and raises $350 billion in funds labeled taxes. Who do you suppose pays for the $50 billion difference? The tooth fairy? Hardly. You do.
-Milton Friedman
Some believe in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables.
-The Bible
Buying a house and buying a house on fire are two different things
-Jamie Dimon talking about the Bear Stearns deal
Give a man a fish; he’ll eat for a day. Give him a sub-prime fish loan and you’re in business, buddy!
-Stephen Colbert
