An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.
Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of the people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance.
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.
Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.
Ask five economists and you'll get five different answers - six if one went to Harvard.
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.
If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.
Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own.
No one spends someone elses money as carefully as he spends his own.
Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.
Few are sufficiently sensible of the importance of that economy in reading which selects, almost exclusively, the very first order of books. Why, except for some special reason, read an inferior book, at the very time you might be reading one of the highest order?
We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
Economy is the method by which we prepare today to afford the improvements of tomorrow.
According to the Bank of England the economy is growing too fast so interest rates must rise to counter the supposed inflationary threat. In lay terms, I interpret this to mean that people are working much harder, causing economic growth, and they're in danger of spending their money, which is what the recession-hit shops want them to do. But the Bank and the City seem to think this is wrong, and that if people work harder they should be punished by having their mortgages increased.
According to the Bank of England the economy is growing too fast so interest rates must rise to counter the supposed inflationary threat.
Ours is an age in which thousands are driven daily from their homelands by the unforgiving brutalities of war, terrorism, political oppression, starvation, disease, economic piracy, and the relentless suffocation of that singular breath which makes human beings individuals.
How great, my friends, is the virtue of living upon a little!
Give me a one-handed economist! All my economists say, On the one hand on the other.
or simply:
