Lacking education, lacking a tenacity of purpose, lacking a willingness to work hard, he will not be an object of employers' competition. What leader… - George Stigler

Consider the Negro as a neighbor. He is frequently repelled and avoided by the white man, but is it only color prejudice? On the contrary, it is because the Negro family is, on average, a loose, morally lax group, and brings with its presence a rapid rise in crime and vandalism. No statutes, no sermons, no demonstrations, will obtain for the Negro the liking and respect that sober virtues commend. And the leaders of Negro thought: they blame the crime and immorality upon the slums and the low income—as if individual responsibility could be bought with a thousand dollars a year.

Two main alternative views of the regulation of industry are widely held. The first is that regulation is instituted primarily for the protection and benefit of the public at large or some large subclass of the public. In this view, the regulations which injure the public -as when the oil import quotas increase the cost of petroleum products to America by $5 billion or more a year- are costs of some social goal (here, national defense) or, occasionally, perversions of the regulatory philosophy. the second view is essentially that the political process defies rational explanation: "politics" is an imponderable, a constantly and unpredictably shifting mixture of forces of the most diverse nature, comprehending acts of great moral virtue (the emancipation of slaves) and of the most vulgar venality (the congressman feathering his own nest).

And anyway, although a fancy theory is not so good as a simple one (more things can go wrong with the fancy one), a fancy theory is better than none. Let the reader try to contrive an alternative explanation of the fact that prices of washing machines vary relatively more than prices of automobiles. He may come up with a rule such as the more expensive the commodity, the less its price varies, which seems to fit our facts-in fact, it makes the same prediction. But quite aside from the fact that it has no logical basis, this alternative explanation will often be wrong: the price of sugar varies much less than that of tea, although sugar costs less per pound. This is not a contradiction of our theory, which in a fuller version says that the aggregate amount spent on a commodity governs the amount of search.