Here are some quotes from the week that I found interesting. I liked the first one so much I wanted to share it, but thought I should add a few more.

1. “I think we have the best president imaginable in the White House right now, but if we wait on him to solve all our problems, we’re not being America.” Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark (March 8). I love this quote, and I couldn’t agree more, well, at least with the second half of that sentence. It used to be that Americans did not wait for their government to do things for them. Does nobody in government these days remember JFK’s speech? “Ask not your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” I was very impressed with Booker on Real Time with Bill Maher – he was level-headed, well-informed and not at all mean-spirited. Pretty much the opposite of Bill Maher.

2. “Nothing is harder in politics than doing something now that costs money in order to gain benefits twenty years from now.” President Barack Obama, (March 5). Amen. I agree with Pres. Obama on this, and wish more politicians took a long-term cost-benefit approach. I also wish more Americans realized the short-run sacrifices that must be made for long-run gains, and voted accordingly.

3. “Never waste a good crisis.” – Senator Hillary Clinton (March 6). Sen. Clinton echoed White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel who said the same thing in November. Hillary’s goal in this speech in Brussels was furthering worldwide efforts on combating climate change. I’m not sure how adding carbon taxes and regulations are going to be easier to get pushed through when the world is in a recession and more people are unemployed and struggling to feed their families and keep their homes, but what do I know? I’m an economist, and we all know Hillary doesn’t care what economists think.

4. “Do you think there’s any truth to what the Republicans are saying, that the Democrats are taking advantage of this crisis to put forth their agenda? Now, that’s how Republicans think because when 9/11 happened, of course, that’s what they did.” –Bill Maher (March 6 – just a few hours after Hillary’s quote above). Uh, yeah, Bill, there is some truth to it. Ask Hillary. I know Bill loves to think that Republicans are evil and Democras are saints, but it’s not just Republicans that are opportunistic. Most politicians are opportunistic. Maher’s quote is similar to one I heard from Judge Andrew Napolitano on the radio earlier this week. I don’t have the exact quote, but his basic point was that Obama is behaving very much like Bush did. Bush used 9/11 to push through the Patriot Act, and Obama is using the current recession to push through his stimulus and budget bills. Both presidents said that the situation was so urgent that they could not waste time with debate, used the urgency of the situation to get a bill passed quickly that otherwise would have met with substantial debate, and implied that anybody who disagreed with them was doing harm to the country.

Update: Here are two more.

5. “If you bound the arms and legs of gold-medal swimmer Michael Phelps, weighed him down with chains, threw him in a pool and he sank, you wouldn’t call it a ‘failure of swimming’. So, when markets have been weighted down by inept and excessive regulation, why call this a ‘failure of capitalism’?”  – Peter Boettke, George Mason University. The same people that say “this is not socialism; we have always had a blend of markets and government” seem to be the same people that now decry capitalism and say that it has failed and now we have to push more towards government intervention. It wasn’t capitalism that failed — it was the specific blend of capitalism and regulation/taxes/subsidies that were in place in the housing and financial markets. People in government are so quick to blame the capitalism portion instead of the regulation/taxes/subsidies portion.

6. “Occasional crises are the cost of the prosperity that entrepreneurial capitalism brings. Try to eliminate risk, and you eliminate entrepreneurship itself.” – more from Peter Boettke, in this editorial. Lambasting bank executives, saying they wanted capitalism on the way up but socialism on the way down, is just fine. The solution is not to destroy capitalism — it is to stop bailing everyone out.