Economics Quotes - Page 15

• 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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• The greatest productive force is human selfishness.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Liberty, Selfishness, Libertarian

  Robert A. Heinlein (1987). “Time Enough for Love”, p.325, Penguin

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• It takes resolution to go forth from the ease and beautiful simplicity of a well-formed hypothesis and struggle with amorphous facts.

  John Maurice Clark

  Beautiful, Struggle, Simplicity

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• As the work progresses the careful reader will insert mental interrogation points here and there. He will find that his interest increases as the interrogation points become more frequent, and that it culminates where they are changed to marks of positive dissent. I venture to record the opinion that the value of the work reaches a maximum in a passage that is demonstrably incorrect.

  John Bates Clark

  Progress, Here And There, Records

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• I have the same confidence in the ability of our people to reject noxious literature as I have in their capacity to sort out the true from the false in theology, economics, or any other field.

  William O. Douglas

  People, Literature, Fields

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• Among the current discussions, the impact of new and sophisticated methods in the study of the past occupies an important place. The new 'scientific' or 'cliometric' history-born of the marriage contracted between historical problems and advanced statistical analysis, with economic theory as bridesmaid and the computer as best man-has made tremendous advances in the last generation.

  Robert Fogel

  Science, Past, Men

  Robert William Fogel, Geoffrey Rudolph Elton (1983). “Which Road to the Past?: Two Views of History”, p.2, Yale University Press

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• We might as well reasonably dispute whether it is the upper or the under blade of a pair of scissors that cuts a piece of paper, as whether value is governed by demand or supply.

  Alfred Marshall

  Cutting, Pieces, Paper

  Alfred Marshall (2009). “Principles of Economics: Unabridged Eighth Edition”, p.290, Cosimo, Inc.

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• The truth is never pure and rarely simple.

  Oscar Wilde

  Simple, Truth Is, Pure

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• There is always enough for the needy, there is never enough for the greedy.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Greedy, Enough, Needy

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• The best of all monopoly profits is a quiet life.

  Sir John Richard Hicks

  Monopoly Power, Quiet, Profit

  1935 Econometrica,'The Theory of Monopoly'.

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• Protectionism is the institutionalization of economic failure.

  Edward Heath

  Economic, Protectionism

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• The value of a yellow metal (gold), originally chosen as money because it tickled the fancy of savages, is clearly a chancy and irrelevant thing on which to base the value of our money and the stability of our industrial system.

  Dennis Holme Robertson

  Yellow, Gold, Savages

  Sir Dennis Holme Robertson (1929). “Money”

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• Neither a state nor a bank ever have had unrestricted power of issuing paper money without abusing that power.

  David Ricardo

  Paper, States, Paper Money

  David Ricardo, John Ramsay McCulloch (1846). “The Works of David Ricardo, Esq., M.P.: With a Notice of the Life and Writings of the Author”, p.215, London, J. Murray

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• Trade unionism is not socialism. It is the capitalism of the proletariat.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Socialism, Proletariat, Trade

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• Government is an art, not a science, and an adventure, not a planned itinerary.

  Donald Creighton

  Art, Adventure, Government

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• Democracy will defeat the economist at every turn on its own genre.

  Harold Innis

  Democracy, Defeat, Genre

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• We have one asset, and that's people.

  Sylvia Ostry

  People, Assets

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• I have only one thing to say to the tax increasers: Go ahead, make my day.

  Ronald Reagan

  Political, Taxation, Taxes

  Remarks to American Business Conference, Washington, D.C., 13 Mar. 1985 See Film Lines 164

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