By 1991, the Hindustan Fertilizer Corporation had been up and running for twelve years.3 Every day, twelve hundred employees reported to work with the avowed goal of producing fertilizer. There was just one small complication: The plant had never actually produced any salable fertilizer. None. Government bureaucrats ran the plant using public funds

the private costs of my behavior are different from the social costs.

In the years of communism, there were roughly two abortions for every single live birth. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western contraceptives have become widely available and the abortion rate has fallen by half.

Burger King does not want its employees stealing. And the only way employees can steal without getting caught is by performing transactions without recording them on the cash register—selling you a burger and fries without issuing a receipt and then pocketing the cash. This is what economists call a principal-agent problem.

In short, government is like a surgeon’s scalpel: It is an intrusive tool that can be used for good or for ill. Wielded carefully and judiciously, it will facilitate the body’s remarkable ability to heal itself. In the wrong hands, or wielded overzealously with even the best of intentions, it can cause great harm.

The market is like evolution; it is an extraordinarily powerful force that derives its strength from rewarding the swift, the strong, and the smart.

By one calculation, if no new cases were filed in India, it would still take 324 years to clear all the existing cases from the docket.

the Laffer curve, which provided the intellectual underpinnings for the large Reagan-era tax cuts.

how a country that could put a man on the moon could still have people sleeping on the streets.