Imagine, if you will, a man, a professor of economics. The man is around 55 - 60 years of age, but looks as if he's pushing 95. The man speaks with a gravelly voice, the result of being a heavy smoker. No matter where he is or who he is talking to, he speaks in short, choppy and abrupt sentences. He is talking about the production possibilities frontier, a model used by economists to describe the choices available to society when it is using its resources to their fullest extent.
"You've got your guns, and you've got your butter. Suppose one country produces nothing but butter and another produces nothing but guns. How can the country with the guns obtain some of the other country's butter? Well, I suppose the country with the guns can invade the other country and steal its butter."
That's my recollection of one of Walter Johnson's lectures at the University of Missouri. Walter, who passed away in 2001, is being honored by having "his" auditorium, Middlebush Auditorium - the auditorium in which he taught thousands of University of Missouri students (500 at a time) Principles of Macroeconomics - renamed in his honor.