52 Quotes by Joel Miller

Markets are nimble and efficient, gathering the collective but disbursed intelligence of the economy's players and communicating up-to-the-minute realities of prices, product availability, etc. Government is typically cumbersome, plodding, and slow.

Today, the law is a crazy quilt of provisions and clauses that very often have little to do with securing general happiness but instead are designed to secure the particular happiness of various advocacy groups, politicians and bureaucrats.

Political changes and reforms do not usually favor the general populace. They benefit those who are positioned to best organize and advocate for their policies.

With its brutal excesses and reliance on snitches and finks as informants, I don't think it's far off-kilter to describe the modern-day drug war as oddly similar to the Salem witch trials.

Far from a simple attempt to rid the nation of crime and drugs, our policy against narcotics -- like any public policy -- comes with strings attached. And increasingly these strings are constricting around the necks of Americans' lives and liberties.

What we have to remember is that not everything is under our control. If people are free in any meaningful sense of the word, that means they are at liberty to foul up their lives as much as make something grand of them. That's a gamble we all take. That's the risk of liberty. Nobody wants others to screw up their lives, but each must be free to do so for themselves.

The only way to effectively secure the common good is for the government to remain small.

As government increases in quantity, our lives decrease in quality.

Bureaucracies typically move slowly, clumsily, and without much regard for the wants and needs of the people they supposedly serve.