Edward Conard

When all is said and done, you're either for investment and risk taking as a solution for what ails the economy, or you're against it. The real world offers no middle ground.

You have to motivate people to take almost certain failure to get a small amount of success, which has driven our economy forward.

What is competent? Who is it that can adjudicate what is competent or not competent? If the guys that are running the most important banks in our country aren't competent enough, well then, who is competent enough?

Talented people have a responsibility to get the training they need to be successful risk takers and go out there to take risks. What I see is surplus of talented people and a shortage of people willing to take the risks.

We have made a decision in our economy to lower taxes on successful risk-taking and have been very successful relative to Europe and Japan.

I try not to delve too deep into policy.

We have to make sure that the banks pay every nickel of loan losses that they create, but we don't want to hold them responsible for withdrawals if we want the economy to recover.

The job of every president is to ride herd over Congress.

Republicans' focus on defunding or scaling back Obamacare - an unpopular entitlement program - rather than entitlements generally, namely Social Security and Medicare, has raised questions about their true objective. But critics forget that spending is fungible.

Innovation is like looking for pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. You have to find a lot of pieces that don't match to find the one or two pieces that match.

Art history and Elizabethan poetry don't employ workers; the arduous and tedious application of business sciences such as computer programming and accounting does.

In the 1950s and 1960s, an explosion of great corporate jobs, together with a restricted supply of labor, produced healthy wage growth.

The United States ran the table on Internet innovations, creating companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Cisco, Twitter, Amazon, eBay, YouTube, and others. Europe and Japan scarcely contributed.

The willingness to take risk is largely a function of wealth.

When rewards go up, people are more inclined to take risks.

What is the upside of inequality? I would say that it's a deep pool of properly trained, highly motivated talent that is endeavoring to create innovation that grows our knowledge-based economy.

There are two ways to think about the one percent - the Bernie Sanders way, where we're all competing for a zero-sum pie where it's just a question of negotiations. The second way, which is the one I put forward, is no, it's really innovation in a knowledge-based economy.

While it's a shame that more businessmen like Andy Puzder aren't helping to form America's economic policy, at least he's still on the field fighting the good fight.

Economics is counterintuitive. It just is.

Lesser-skilled workers suffer the entire burden of lower wages but capture only a portion of the benefits from lower-priced offshore goods.

I have no interest in bailing out anybody, quite frankly, and I think banks have to suffer every dollar of loss if they make a bad loan.

Making products for $17 an hour that we could have purchased for 75 cents an hour wastes resources that we could have used elsewhere.

Lowering the middle-class tax rate... will likely lower work efforts and increase government dependence.

Because my business partner, Mitt Romney, was running for president when 'Unintended Consequences' was published, the media held up my book as a defense of the 1 percent.

Unfortunately, we have to dial down low-skilled immigration. We have to recognize that there is more unemployment among the lesser-skilled workers than among the most-skilled workers.