“If you agree that local politics should be about protecting others’ liberty to become the people they want to become rather than giving you the tools to turn them into the people you want them to become, what should your city do?” ~ Art Carden
“Should you spend your time voting, preparing to vote, researching the candidates, and so on? Or should you take five or ten minutes to fill out the customer satisfaction survey that you were emailed after your last flight or hotel stay?” ~ Art Carden
“What I think is most striking about Walmart – and what I would hope Joan of Arc, Genghis Khan, Socrates, and others would notice – is that the floor-to-ceiling cornucopia is not restricted to the elites.” ~ Art Carden
“The real ‘capitalist achievement,’ however, isn’t Graceland. It’s the fact that compared to the stuff of the average person’s day-to-day life in 2023, Graceland just isn’t that impressive.” ~ Art Carden
“If we don’t have the vision and political will to do something as unambiguously beneficial as to stop minting pennies and nickels, then perhaps ‘vision and political will’ aren’t going to give us the better future we want.” ~ Art Carden
“One of the hardiest and most enduring fallacies in economics is the mercantilist fallacy: buying from foreigners is bad for us because we should ‘keep the money here;’ selling to foreigners is good for us because we can pile up more money.” ~ Art Carden
“You’ve heard the aphorism ‘one person’s trash is another person’s treasure.’ Trade turns trash into treasure by getting it out of one set of hands and into another.” ~ Art Carden
“For most of our existence, life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short for pretty much everybody. Then we became a society of traders rather than a society of raiders.” ~ Art Carden
“If there’s still money to be made, consumers are voting for more, and it is not my prerogative, nor yours, or Bernie Sanders’, or anyone else’s to suppress those votes.” ~ Art Carden