All Americans are rich—indeed, we are rich at unprecedented levels. We are not equally rich, but we are all rich. Perhaps therein lies the rub, what really is bothering Stiglitz and others? What if it turned out that the only way we could all have these unprecedented levels of wealth is if we allowed great inequality?

The bulb ban makes sense only one of two ways: either as an expression of cultural sanctimony, with a little technophilia thrown in for added glamour, or as a roundabout way to transfer wealth from the general public to the few businesses with the know-how to produce the light bulbs consumers don’t really want to buy.
Or, of course, as both.

The upside of a parliamentary system is that it can be better than our system of checks and balances. The downside is that it can be way worse. Good reforms can be implemented more easily. Bad policies can also be implemented more easily.

Sometimes it looks as if the Europeans and the Americans are in a contest to see who can do the most to mess up an economy that should be very strong. Today, surprisingly, the Europeans seem to have won a round.

By some measures, if one combines both both international and domestic tourism, tourism is the largest industry in the world.

The incentives for a regulator are all wrong. He will hardly ever get fired for forbidding something and will routinely get criticized for allowing almost anything by somebody. Something new today is at best a danger to a regulator.

Clarence Darrow anticipated the prison nation that America is today a hundred years ago in his book Resist Not Evil. All areas of life have become part of the penal code, with an army of people operating as police, legislators, and the court system to enforce these laws through force and violence. But even Darrow wouldn’t have dreamed that the unauthorized use of the Smokey Bear image, or of the slogan “Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute” can land a person in federal prison.

Because nobody else can understand them, modern economists speak to one another. They gossip in algebra and remonstrate in differential calculus. And when the pungently correct mathematical equation doesn’t occur to them, they awkwardly fall back on the English language, like a middle-aged American trying to remember his high-school Spanish. The economist Frédéric Bastiat, who lived in the first half of the 19th century, wrote in French, not symbols. But his words—forceful, clear and witty—live to this day.