EDWARD CONARD

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.

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

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.

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.

God didn't create the universe so that talented people would be happy.

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

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.

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.

When I look around, I see a world of unrealized opportunities for improvements, an abundance of talented people able to take the risks necessary to make improvements, but a shortage of people and investors willing to take those risks.

High-skilled workers increasingly choose lucrative jobs that don't serve or supervise low-skilled workers. Low-skilled productivity and wage growth has lagged as a result.

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

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

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.

In today's information-driven economy, business and scientific talent constrains 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.

Let's not kid ourselves about just how cheap offshore labor really is. We not only pay substantially less per hour: we also avoid the costs we would incur if these workers immigrated here. We don't pay for their medical expenses when they show up in the emergency room without insurance.

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?

I am the individual who formed and funded W Spann LLC. I authorized W Spann LLC's contribution to Restore Our Future PAC. I did so after consulting prominent legal counsel regarding the transaction and based on my understanding that the contribution would comply with applicable laws.

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.

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.

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

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

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

As the news media eagerly report on polls showing that millennials increasingly reject capitalism, progressives energetically push the Democratic Party to the left.