Interventionism

In order to answer these questions, we must realize that government is an agency for coercion, and we should understand how man reacts to coercion or in the absence of coercion.

The political machine is familiar to Americans. While it may lead to gross abuses, experience shows that some sort of behind-the-scenes organization may be useful to the functioning of democratic institutions.

In a recent flash of insight, I came up with a way to make charitable impulses more productive, but I had to abandon the idea once I realized the government wouldn't approve.

You rarely know the prices of what you are getting.

"The fact that credit booms are encouraged by derivative instruments has substantially increased the destabilizing effects of an artificial credit-expansion policy carried out by keeping the market interest rates below natural interest rates."

Until that happy day when education is disestablished, Illich is searching for methods of moving strongly away from the public education system.

Still, the book is a beginning — an attempt to communicate free-market solutions to specific problems, to classes of people usually inimical to this approach.

We can understand the reaction today to people calling to "end the Fed."

All that stands between the present awful reality and 0% unemployment is a class of social managers unwilling to admit error.

Maybe letting the market fix what government broke isn't an option they can bring themselves to embrace, even if it's the only way out.