Edward Conard Quotes

If you create an artificial scarcity through public policy, artificial rent so to speak - setting up a new import quota or giving out a particular office that is very beneficial - people are going to invest money, time and resources in trying to secure that opportunity. If the value is created independently of the search for it, the search for it is wasted.

You have cocktails for 250,000 people when millions upon millions are sick.

Who authorised the spend of millions of pounds and thousands of man hours into a stale, historical situation from three decades ago - with virtually no complaints made?

Bad spending, to me, in terms of its economic benefit, would be wealth transfer payments. It's a misallocation of resources.

In America, we are just moving the chairs around and spending huge amounts of money rather than having them go in making people's lives better.

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

Doing good with other people's money has two basic flaws. In the first place, you never spend anybody else's money as carefully as you spend your own. So a large fraction of that money is inevitably wasted. In the second place, and equally important, you cannot do good with other people's money unless you first get the money away from them. So that force - sending a policeman to take the money from somebody's pocket - is fundamentally at the basis of the philosophy of the welfare state.

One of the most ridiculous defenses of foreign aid is that it is a very small part of our national income. If the average American set fire to a five-dollar bill, it would be an even smaller percentage of his annual income. But everyone would consider him foolish for doing it.

It wasn't what we needed then that was hurting us, it was what we was paying for that we had already used up. The country was just buying gasoline for a leaky tank. Everything was going into a gopher hole and you couldent see where you was going to get any of it back.

Imagine that Queen Elizabeth I, in her time, had the opportunity to give out a monopoly for playing cards within the kingdom. She knew she was going to give it to one of her courtiers. These courtiers would then all try to curry her favour. Meanwhile, they would not contribute anything to the product of the kingdom, in fact, they were wasting resources trying to secure a single prize. That, more or less, is rent seeking.

It's my guess that something like 5% of GDP goes to money management and itsattendant friction. I define it broadly - annuities, incentive pay, all trading, etc. Nobody else has used figures that high, but that's my guess. Worst of all, the people doing this are among the best and the brightest. Hundreds and thousands of engineers, etc. are going into hedge funds and investment banking. That is not an intelligent allocation of the brainpower of the civilization.

I think I see a tremendous amount of waste. I see a tremendous amount of job opportunities that have been let go for many years, and I'm not just talking about President Obama. I'm talking about for many, many years. And I was a big, big fan of Ronald Reagan, but I was a never big fan on trade with respect to Ronald Reagan.

Value is the life-giving power of anything; cost, the quantity of labour required to produce it; its price, the quantity of labourwhich its possessor will take in exchange for it.

Costs merely register competing attractions.

We all have many opportunities, but limited capacity to pursue them. Make choices, focus your time and energy, so that you can submit your share of masterpieces to the greater good.

Time is your most important resource. You can do so much in ten minutes. Ten minutes; once gone is gone for good.

Economy, n. Purchasing the barrel of whiskey that you do not need for the price of the cow that you cannot afford.

The primary aim of modern warfare ... is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.

Money is all about opportunity cost. Every time you spend on something, that's something you can't spend on something else.

When any welfare scheme is being proposed, its political sponsors always dwell on what a generous and compassionate government should pay to Paul; they neglect to mention that this additional money must be seized from Peter.

Time, like money, is measured by our needs.

What is economics? A science invented by the upper class in order to acquire the fruits of the labor of the underclass

The price of ability does not depend on merit but on supply and demand.

Waste of time is the most extravagant and costly of all expenses.

Unfortunately, in rich-world health, innovation is both your friend and your enemy. Innovation is inventing organ replacement, joint replacement. We're inventing ways of doing new things that cost $300,000 and take people in their 70s and, on average, give them an extra, say, two or three years of life. And then you have to say, given finite resources, should we fire two or three teachers to do this operation?