Quotation of the Day…

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… is from pages 4-5 of the 2009 Revised Edition of Thomas Sowell’s Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One [original emphasis]:

The very way that issues are conceived tends to be different in politics from the way they are conceived in economics. Political thinking tends to conceive of policies, institutions, or programs in terms of their hoped-for results – “drug prevention” programs, “gun control” laws, “environmental protection” policies, “public interest” law firms, “profit-making” businesses, and so forth. But for purposes of economic analysis, what matters is not what goals are being sought but what incentives and constraints are being created in pursuit of those goals.