David R. Henderson Quotes

The worst discrimination against black people in the United States was the introduction of slavery. Short of murder and torture, slavery is the greatest possible violation of people’s rights. It is essentially legalized kidnapping.

Most people understand the right to property better in practice than in theory. This was vividly illustrated by economist Gordon Tullock in a class he taught at the University of Virginia in the late 1960s. An undergraduate student in his class said that there was no such thing as property rights;…. So Gordon grabbed the student’s wallet. The student asked him to give it back, figuring presumably, that his simple request would get him his wallet back. But Tullock refused, saying that if there was no such thing as property rights, how could he, the student, own this wallet that he claimed as his.

Barbara Walters asked Ronald Reagan, what do you think about the Soviet Union and how much of a threat they are to us and to our freedom. And he said, ‘They’re a threat, but the biggest threat to our freedom is our own governments.’ And I agree with him. It’s governments at every level in the United States right now and in most of the world that are assaulting freedom daily.

Our oil supply is secure, not because our government threatens to use force against those who would make it insecure, but because the world’s oil suppliers want to make money.

Many people at various points on the political spectrum have claimed that the U.S. thirst for oil is so great that, unless we change our habits (the left emphasizes conservation, and the right emphasizes drilling in the Arctic wildlife refuge and elsewhere), the U.S. government will find itself drawn into wars to maintain access. This thinking shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how energy markets work. There is no good case for going to war over oil.

Milton Friedman and I had our differences about foreign policy. I tried, in vain, to persuade him to be against the first Gulf war. Even there, though, he publicly supported, in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, my economic argument against the war. He stated, ‘Henderson’s analysis is correct. There is no justification for intervention on grounds of oil.’

The history of economic growth is the history of people making more with less and shifting into new jobs that were unheard of in the previous generation.