Private Enterprise Quotes - Page 3

• The idea that government can instruct private enterprise on how to eliminate waste is preposterous.

  James Cook

  Government, Ideas, Waste

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• The real story of Detroit [...] can be summed up in seven words. Private enterprise built it, government destroyed it.

  Peter Schiff

  Real, Government, Stories

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• If the State does not acquire supremacy over [vast private] enterprises, it becomes their puppet, and they become the real State.

  Bertrand Russell

  Real, Puppets, Doe

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell”, p.652, Routledge

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• I used to be a businessman and I enjoyed what I did and I thought that it was socially useful. I don't have anything against business or private enterprise or capitalism per se, but I think that it is time to rethink the regulation of capitalism.

  Charles Ferguson

  Thinking, Regulation, Used

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Those in power are blind devotees to private enterprise. They accept that degree of socialism implicit in the vast subsidies to the military-industrial-complex, but not that type of socialism which maintains public projects for the disemployed and the unemployed alike.

  William O. Douglas

  Military, Subsidies, Degrees

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• It would be madness to let the purposes or the methods of private enterprise set the habits of the age of atomic energy.

  Harold Laski

  Age, Energy, Would Be

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• Lovemaking surely must be, for human beings at our present state of development, one of the more private enterprises. Who would want a witness to that entire self-abandonment and helplessness?

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Self, Development, Want

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• Government-to-government aid rests on socialistic assumptions and promotes socialism and stagnation, whereas private foreign investment rest on capitalist assumptions and promotes private enterprise and maximum economic growth.

  Henry Hazlitt

  Government, Growth, Assumption

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• I am all in favor of pay equity for women, but this kind of legislation, as is typical of what's being proposed by my friends on the other side of the aisle, opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems.

  John McCain

  Government, Typical, Roles

  "Obama strategy: Equal pay, not abortion" by Avi Zenilman and Carrie Budoff Brown, www.politico.com. July 14, 2008.

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• The principle of real leadership ignored, the immortal objects of society forgotten, practical conservatism degenerated into mere laudation of private enterprise, economic policy almost wholly surrendered to special interests.

  Russell Kirk

  Real, Special, Principles

  Russell Kirk (1978). “The conservative mind: from Burke to Eliot”

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• The trouble with the Labour Party is that they don't really believe in Socialism, but they cannot wholeheartedly approve of private enterprise either.

  Jo Grimond

  Party, Believe, Political

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• The problem isn't that conservatives are wrong about the efficiency of markets or the creativity of enterprise. It's that they have made false idols of both, usually without acknowledging that markets work best when well regulated, that private enterprise cannot meet every human need, that government has always played a critical role in our economy, and that the profit motive can be socially and environmentally destructive as well as dynamic.

  Joe Conason

  Creativity, Government, Idols

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• It's true that private enterprise is extremely flexible, But its only good within very narrow limits. If private enterprise isn't held in an iron grip it gives birth to people who are no better than beasts, those stock-exchange people with greedy appetites beyond restraint.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Iron, People, Giving

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• Bearing all this in mind, we see that there is no Russian national understanding which would permit the early establishment in Russia of anything resembling the private enterprise system as we know it.

  George F. Kennan

  Russia, Understanding, Mind

  George F. Kennan (2012). “American Diplomacy: Sixtieth-Anniversary Expanded Edition”, p.139, University of Chicago Press

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• Capitalism is chronically unstable.Boom and bust has always marked capitalism in the United States. There were panics in 1785, 1791, 1819, 1857, 1869, 1873, 1907, 1929 and 1987.In economies and politics, as in war, an astonishing number of people die, like the man on the railway crossing, defending their right of way. This is a poorly developed instinct in Switzerland. No country so firmly avows the principles of private enterprise but in few have the practical concessions to socialism been more numerous and varied.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Country, War, Men

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• The treasury could fill old bottles with banknotes and bury them..and leave it to private enterprises on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Principles, Bottles, Laissez Faire

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• Government-to-government foreign aid promotes statism, centralized planning, socialism, dependence, pauperization, inefficiency, and waste. It prolongs the poverty it is designed to cure. Voluntary private investment in private enterprise, on the other hand, promotes capitalism, production, independence, and self-reliance.

  Henry Hazlitt

  Government, Self, Hands

  Henry Hazlitt, Hans F. Sennholz (1993). “The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt”, Foundation for Economic Education

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• There can be no freedom of the individual, no democracy, without the capital system, the profit system, the private enterprise system. These are, in the end, inseparable. Those who would destroy freedom have only first to destroy the hope of gain, the profit of enterprise and risk-taking, the hope of accumulating capital, the hope to save something for one's old age and for one's children. For a community of men without property, and without the hope of getting it by honest effort, is a community of slaves of a despotic State.

  Russell Cornell Leffingwell

  Children, Honesty, Freedom

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• Private enterprise manages so much better all the concerns to which it is equal.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Civil Rights, Equal, Enterprise

  Thomas Jefferson, Richard Holland Johnston, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson”

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• The surest way for a poor nation to stay poor is to harass, hobble, and straitjacket private enterprise or to discourage or destroy it by subsidized government competition, oppressive taxation, or outright expropriation.

  Henry Hazlitt

  Government, Competition, Poor Nations

  Henry Hazlitt (1971). “Man Vs. the Welfare State”, p.171, Ludwig von Mises Institute

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• The future of private enterprise capitalism is also the future of a free society. There is no possibility of having a politically free society unless the major part of its economic resources are operated under a capitalistic private enterprise system.

  Milton Friedman

  Economic, Possibility, Resources

  Milton Friedman (1978). “Tax limitation, inflation and the role of government”, Fisher Inst

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• Bureaucrats denounce private enterprise for the consequences of their own reckless policies and demand still more governmental controls.

  Henry Hazlitt

  Demand, Reckless, Enterprise

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• Politicians, bureaucrats, editors, new commentators, 'economists' teachers,' and other word artists who denounce private enterprise and praise socialism are their own worst enemies...these attackers are unwittingly destroying the sources of their own livelihood. They kill the geese that lay the golden eggs - and don't know it!

  Leonard Read

  Teacher, Artist, Editors

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• Education is here placed among the articles of public care, not that it would be proposed to take its ordinary branches out of the hands of private enterprise, which manages so much better all the concerns to which it is equal, but a public institution can alone supply those sciences which, though rarely called for, are yet necessary to complete the circle, all the parts of which contribute to the improvement of the country, and some of them to its preservation.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Education, Country, Hands

  Thomas Jefferson (1854). “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson”, p.68

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• Many understand "state socialism" in this way. Sometimes a system is concealed behind this term in which the capitalist state, in the interests of preparation for the conduct of war, takes upon itself the maintenance of a certain number of private enterprises.

  Joseph Stalin

  War, Numbers, Preparation

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