"Those who teach, and who think for a living about American history, need to be told: Keep the text, teach the text, and only then, if you must, deconstruct the text.

When you don't love something you lose it. If we do not teach new Americans to love their country, and not for braying or nationalistic reasons but for reasons of honest and thoughtful appreciation, and gratitude, for a history that is something new in the long story of man, then we will begin to lose it."
-Peggy Noonan

"In the American Studies program at Al-Quds, an Arab university in Jerusalem, they are learning how the US came to be. Graduate student Urieb Abdel Samad, who also works for the American Friends Service Committee in Ramallah, was amazed how the US "started with nothing." Abdel Samad said she was interested in how Americans "just came from different countries of the world and in a very short time they became the largest power in the world. What is it? What is it about?" "
-Jerusalem Post

"Free-market economics, a legacy of the classical school, is thought of as an old conservative doctrine. But it was in fact one of the most revolutionary concepts to emerge in the history of ideas. Moreover, "the thinking of the classical economist was not only a radical break from landmark intellectual figures like Plato and Machiavelli but also from mainstream thinking to this day." The notion of a self-equilibrating system -- the market economy -- meant a reduced role for intellectuals and politicians." And even today many still haven't accepted that their superior wisdom might be superfluous, if not damaging."
-interview with Thomas Sowell

"People always want more than they have. Always. It has nothing to do with the material age we live in. It has nothing to do with whether the economy is working well. Inevitably, our desires outstrip our resources. [...]The Talmud asks: who is wealthy? And the answer is: he who is content with his lot. Few reach that level, not because they are financial failures but rather because of their natures. [...]The fact that we all feel busy and that we feel the pressure of financial issues has nothing to do with our economy and everything to do with our nature. Religion is a much better place to search for a cure for that ill than economic policy."
-Russell Roberts

14th anniversary of the death of F.A. Hayek

"Individuals who make up government are spending other people's money for yet other people's benefit. So these officials lack both the incentives and the knowledge to spend this money wisely."

"The market is the only means of harnessing individual knowledge and effort for the greater good."

-paraphrases from F.A. Hayek

Answer to Poverty

"If we truly want to help the poor, rather than just congratulate ourselves for generosity, we rich Westerners have to give up our grand ambitions. Piecemeal problem-solving has the best chance of success.
[Contrast the] Planner approach of most aid projects with the Searcher approach that works so well in the markets and democracies of the West. Searchers treat problem-solving as an incremental discovery process, relying on competition and feedback to figure out what works.
A Planner thinks he already knows the answers. A Searcher admits he doesn't know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional and technological factors. Planners trust outside experts. Searchers emphasize homegrown solutions."

-New York Times Book Review of "The White Man's Burden" by William Easterly