Economics Quotes - Page 11

• The study of economics has been again and again led astray by the vain idea that economics must proceed according to the pattern of other sciences.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Ideas, Patterns, Study

  Ludwig Von Mises (1962). “The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science: An Essay on Method”

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• The first commandment of economics is: Grow. Grow forever. Companies get bigger. National economies need to swell by a certain percent each year. People should want more, make more, earn more, spend more - ever more.
  The first commandment of the Earth is: enough. Just so much and no more. Just so much soil. Just so much water. Just so much sunshine. Everything born of the Earth grows to its appropriate size and then stops.

  Donella Meadows

  Sunshine, Years, People

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• It is clear that economics, if it is to be a science at all, must be a mathematical science.

  William Stanley Jevons

  Math, Science, Clear

  1871 The Theory of Political Economy

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• First rule of Economics 101: our desires are insatiable. Second rule: we can stomach only three Big Macs at a time.

  Douglas Horton

  Time, Desire, Three

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• Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Education, Indifferent, Incompetent

  "Infinite Riches: Gems from a Lifetime of Reading" by Leo Calvin Rosten, (p. 165), 1979.

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• Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Love, Money, Men

  John Maynard Keynes, Royal Economic Society (Great Britain) (1972). “The collected writings of John Maynard Keynes”

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• The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder.

  Frederic Bastiat

  Evil, Liberty, Libertarian

  Frederic Bastiat (2006). “The Law”, p.27, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.

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• It's a fundamental aspect of the free enterprise system and economics: If there's no penalty associated with increased costs, why not lay on increased costs?

  John McCain

  Cost, Why Not, Fundamentals

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• With the defeat of the Reich and pending the emergence of the Asiatic, the African and, perhaps, the South American nationalisms, there will remain in the world only two Great Powers capable of confronting each other-the United States and Soviet Russia. The laws of both history and geography will compel these two Powers to a trial of strength, either military or in the fields of economics and ideology. (2nd April 1945)

  Adolf Hitler

  Military, Russia, Law

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• Prices impose the most effective kind of rationing - self-rationing. Why is rationing necessary? Because what everybody wants always adds up to more than there is. . .Resources are limited but desires are not. That is the basic and defining problem of economics.

  Thomas Sowell

  Self, Desire, Add

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• We have weapons of mass destruction we have to address here at home. Poverty is a weapon of mass destruction. Homelessness is a weapon of mass destruction. Unemployment is a weapon of mass destruction.

  Dennis Kucinich

  Home, Health, Mass Destruction

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• It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Government, Effort, Sloth

  P. J. O'Rourke (2007). “Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government”, p.36, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Real, Sight, Investing

  John Maynard Keynes (2006). “General Theory Of Employment , Interest And Money”, p.272, Atlantic Publishers & Dist

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• For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Years, Liberty, Littles

  John Maynard Keynes (1932). “Essays in persuasion”

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• A government debt is a government claim against personal income and private property - an unpaid tax bill.

  Hans F. Sennholz

  Government Debt, Liberty, Income

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• Voters who live off taxpayers are the Democrats' ace in the hole. The Democrats created big programs and never let the recipients forget it. This gives them an initial advantage of tens of millions of votes in any presidential election.

  Joseph Sobran

  Giving, Presidential, Liberty

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• The laws of economics tell us that the expansion of the central state can't go on forever. Its limit is reached when the looted turn on the looters. And that's beginning to happen. More than six decades of hard work for American liberty beginning with the Old Right opposition to the Roosevelt Revolution and continuing with the Mises Institute, is beginning to bear fruit.

  Llewellyn Rockwell

  Hard Work, Law, Forever

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• If you would not confront your neighbor and demand his money at the point of a gun to solve every new problem that may appear in your life, you should not allow the government to do it for you.

  William E. Simon

  Gun, Government, Liberty

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• The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it.

  Harry Browne

  Government, Liberty, Libertarian

  "Liberty A to Z". Book by Harry Browne (p. 76), 2004.

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• Political leaders in capitalist countries who cheer the collapse of socialism in other countries continue to favor socialist solutions in their own. They know the words, but they have not learned the tune.

  Milton Friedman

  Country, Cheer, Leader

  Milton Friedman, Rose Friedman (1990). “Free to Choose: A Personal Statement”, p.9, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly, and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.

  Thomas Sowell

  Games, People, Giving

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• If politicians were serious about day care for children, instead of just sloganizing about it, nothing they could do would improve the quality of child care more than by lifting the heavy burden of taxation that forces so many families to have both parents working.

  Thomas Sowell

  Children, Day Care, Parent

  Thomas Sowell (2013). “Controversial Essays”, p.319, Hoover Press

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• Consider Social Security. The young have always contributed to the support of the old. Earlier, the young helped their own parents out of a sense of love and duty. They now contribute to the support of someone else's parents out of compulsion and fear. The voluntary transfers strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken those bonds.

  Milton Friedman

  Support, Parent, Liberty

  Milton Friedman, William Richard Allen (1983). “Bright promises, dismal performance: an economist's protest”, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc.

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• The fact throughout history is that whenever government dominates the economic affairs of its citizenry, a free society is eroded, then destroyed, and a minority government ensues. Personal liberty without economic liberty is an absolute contradiction; the one cannot exist without the other.

  William E. Simon

  Government, Liberty, Minorities

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• Somehow, the fact that more poor people are on welfare, receiving more generous payments, does not seem to have made this country a nice place to live - not even for the poor on welfare, whose condition seems not noticeably better than when they were poor and off welfare. Something appears to have gone wrong; a liberal and compassionate social policy has bred all sorts of unanticipated and perverse consequences.

  Irving Kristol

  Country, Nice, People

  Irving Kristol (1995). “Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea”, p.48, Simon and Schuster

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