Website owner: James Miller
The characteristic feature of modern capitalism is mass
production of goods destined for consumption by the masses.
The result is a tendency towards a continuous improvement in
the average standard of living, a progressing enrichment of the
many.
Ludwig von Mises
The way to maximize production is to maximize the incentives to
production. And the way to do that, as the modern world has
discovered, is through the system known as capitalism -- the
system of private property, free markets, and free enterprise.
Henry Hazlitt
Modern capitalism benefitted the masses in a double way - both
by greatly increasing the wages of the masses of workers and
greatly reducing the real prices they had to pay for what was
produced.
Henry Hazlitt
Capitalism gave the world what it needed, a higher standard of
living for a steadily increasing number of people.
Ludwig von Mises
Falling prices through increased production is a wonderful
long-run tendency of untrammeled capitalism.
Murray M. Rothbard
Every businessman enjoying customer patronage, whether he be a
baker, banker, or barber is conferring a public benefit, raising
production, and reducing unemployment; businessmen earn their
living by producing products and rendering services wherever
they are needed.
Hans F. Sennholz
Socialism (modern liberalism) is not in the least what it
pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer
world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of
civilization have created. It does not build; it destroys.
Ludwig von Mises
The market steers the capitalistic economy. It directs each
individual's activities into those channels in which he best
serves the wants of his fellow-men. The market alone puts the
whole social system of private ownership of the means of
production and free enterprise in order and provides it with
sense and meaning.
Ludwig von Mises
Nothing has value in itself. The consumer confers value on it
by seeking to acquire it. Hence, the value of a thing is
never objective, but always subjective.
Faustino Ballve
Socialism destroys the incentive to produce, dampens the human
spirit and results, ultimately, in less for everyone.
David Limbaugh
Relief, or redistribution of income, voluntary or coerced, is
never the true solution of poverty, but at best a makeshift,
which may mask the disease and mitigate the pain, but provides
no basic cure.
Henry Hazlitt
Not since the days of the Hitler Youth have young people been
subjected to more propaganda on more politically correct
issues. At one time, educators boasted that their role was not
to teach students what to think but how to think. Today, their
role is far too often to teach student what to think on
everything from immigration to global warming to the new sacred
trinity of "race, class and gender".
Thomas Sowell
Compassion is good but politicians have turned compassion into
the welfare state.
Thomas Sowell
We know that welfare is a failure. It has neither reduced
poverty nor made the poor self-sufficient. It has torn at the
social fabric of the country and been a significant factor in
increasing out-of-wedlock births with all their attendant
problems. It has weakened the work ethic and contributed to
rising crime rates. Most tragically of all, the pathologies
it engenders have been passed on from parent to child, from
generation to generation.
Michael D. Tanner
Once we realize that government doesn't work, we will stop
dreaming that this or that social problem can be solved by
passing a law - or by creating a new government program - or by
electing someone who will make Washington more efficient or
cost-conscious.
Harry Browne
Government relief tends constantly to get out of hand. And
even when it is kept within bounds it tends to reduce the
incentives to work and to save, both of those who receive it and
of those who are forced to pay it. It may be said, in fact,
that practically every measure that governments take with the
ostensible object of "helping the poor" has the long-run effect
of doing the opposite.
Henry Hazlitt
One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the
evils in this world are to be cured by legislation.
Thomas B. Reed
The truth is the committed left press in America is no longer
interested in reporting the news. Anything that hinders a
favorable view of the far left will be ignored; anything that
advances liberal causes will be celebrated. News reporting
today is largely about ideology and shaping the culture, not
about informing the public.
Bill O'Reilly
To judge by what my children are learning in school, you'd
think American history was 75 percent slavery and 25 percent
everything else (and that 25 percent includes a large dollop of
imperialism, racism, sexism and homophobia, leaving little time
for Lincoln, Edison, Clay, Holmes, Alcott, Dickinson, Adams,
Longfellow or Fulton).
Mona Charen
A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man,
which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.
G. Gordon Liddy
It is not the responsibility of the government or the legal
system to protect a citizen from himself.
Justice Casey Percel
Different people rise to the top under socialism than under
capitalism. The higher on the socialist hierarchy you look, the
more you will find people who are too incompetent to do the job
they are supposed to do.
Hans-Herman Hoppe
East Asia confirms the superior capacity of industrial
capitalism in raising the material standard of living of large
masses of people.
Peter L. Berger
The only way to break the cycle of unwed motherhood, fatherless
children, poverty, crime, and welfare is to recognize that
welfare causes more problems than it cures.
David Boaz
Since 1933, New Deal farm policy has continued and expanded,
pursuing its grisly logic at the expense of the nation's
consumers, year in and year out, in Democrat or Republican
times, in good times and in bad.
Murray N. Rothbard
The free market is constantly under attack from those who
believe that they know how to make the world a better place
with properly administered doses of state coercion.
George C. Leef
The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by
men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
Louis Brandeis
Big-government conservatives share a common arrogance with
contemporary liberalism. They are convinced that they know
best what is best for every American and because they know
best, they should guide the rest of us in the proper direction.
Michael D. Tanner
Man is not free unless government is limited ... As government
expands, liberty contracts.
Ronald Reagan
The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for
expedients.
Edmund Burke
Depression is the aftermath of credit expansion.
Ludwig von Mises
Big government conservatism will simply bring us more
government intervention in and control over our lives, greater
regulation, mounting debt that threatens the nation's future
economic health, and less freedom for every American.
Michael D. Tanner
If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you
are not free at all.
Jacob G. Hornberger
The fundamental law of the market is: the customer is always
right.
Ludwig von Mises
To finance "entitlement" programs, the government threatens
force against the taxpayers who provide the money. Why are
people who favor compulsion called humanitarians, while those
who favor freedom are stigmatized as greedy?
John Stossel
Precisely because the State has the monopoly of coercion it can
be allowed the monopoly only of coercion. Only if the modern
State can be held within a strictly limited agency of duties
and powers can it be prevented from regimenting, conquering,
and ultimately devouring the society that gave it birth.
Henry Hazlitt
No government can print wealth. A government can get away with
the illusion that paper is wealth, but in the end too much
paper is always created, and with that action the illusion falls
apart.
Richard Russell
The standard of living of the common man is highest in those
countries which have the greatest number of wealthy
entrepreneurs.
Ludwig von Mises
Popular culture, in all its crudeness, is the output of
liberalism. It is liberalism that for decades has rejected
any protest as "censorship" or "McCarthyism".
Mona Charen
The facts of life are conservative.
Margaret Thatcher
By definition, the moment one crosses from center to left, one
accepts more government control of people's lives. Therefore,
the further left society moves, the more there is government
control over its citizens' lives. It is astonishing that this
obvious fact is not universally acknowledged and that the left
has somehow successfully portrayed itself as preoccupied with
personal liberty.
Dennis Prager
Government intervention into nearly every aspect of our lives
is so common that people often lose sight of how things would
operate absent the intervention.
William L. Anderson
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
William Pitt
A nation that encourages its people to spend more and save less
promotes economic backwardness, social decay and its financial
doom.
Kurt Richebacher
To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or
happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical
idea.
James Madison
The growing size of the government debt should be of real
concern to every creditor and especially to every taxpayer with
any interest whatsoever in private property and personal
freedom.
Paul L. Poirot
Once the idea is accepted that money is something whose supply
is determined by the printing press, it becomes impossible for
the politicians in power to resist the constant demands for
further inflation.
Henry Hazlitt
Government is in the business of misdirected incentives. Take
poverty. Years ago LBJ unleashed a flurry of government
programs to eliminate it. We've spent well over a trillion
dollars and all our good intentions got us is more poverty.
Tom Purcell
Most activists on the left believe that they, not their values,
are morally superior to their adversaries. Therefore, coercing
people to adhere to "progressive" values is morally acceptable,
even demanded.
Dennis Prager
Government aid programs have been endlessly expanded, and the
government has sought to maximize the number of people willing
to accept handouts ... Roughly half of all Americans are
dependent on the government, either for handouts, pensions, or
paychecks.
James Bovard
For Al Gore and Paul Ehrlich and Co., whatever the problem, the
solution is always the same. Whether it is global cooling,
global warming, or overpopulation, we need bigger government,
more regulation, higher taxes, and a massive transfer of power
from the citizen to some unelected self-perpetuating crisis
lobby.
Mark Steyn
If people come to believe that government will act in their
place, they are less likely to become involved themselves.
Indeed, we already see substantial evidence that private
charitable giving tends to decline when government welfare
increases.
Michael D. Tanner
Government welfarism, with its ever-increasing army of
pensioners and other beneficiaries, is fatally easy to launch
and fatally easy to extend, but almost impossible to bring to a
halt - and quite impossible politically to reverse, no matter
how obvious and catastrophic its consequences become.
Henry Hazlitt
The Founding Fathers set up a system that heavily relied upon
self-reliance and competition, with only a small dose of
government intrusion.
Bill O'Reilly
If one regards inflation as an evil, then one has to stop
inflating. One has to balance the budget of the government.
Ludwig von Mises
The consequences of inflation are malinvestment, waste, a
wanton redistribution of wealth and income, the growth of
speculation and gambling, immorality and corruption,
disillusionment, social resentment, upheaval and riots,
bankruptcy, increased government controls, and eventual
collapse.
Henry Hazlitt
There is no remedy for the inefficiency of public management.
Ludwig von Mises
Everything brought forward in favor of Socialism during the
last hundred years, in thousands of writings and speeches,
all the blood which has been spilt by the supporters of Socialism,
cannot make Socialism workable.
Ludwig von Mises
The future of private enterprise capitalism is also the
future of a free society. There is no possibility of having a
free society unless the major part of its economic resources
are operated under a capitalistic private enterprise system.
Milton Friedman
Civil liberties, once so easily and thoughtlessly surrendered,
will be harder by orders of magnitude for our children and
grandchildren to reclaim.
James R. Muhm
The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this
earth is a government program.
Ronald Reagan
Once a fellow's enjoying the fruits of government health care
and all the rest, he couldn't give a hoot about the general
societal interest; He's got his, and if it's going to
bankrupt the state a generation hence, well, as long as they
can keep the checks coming till he's dead, it's fine with him.
Mark Steyn
The quickest and surest way to production, prosperity, and
economic health is through private enterprise. The best way
for governments to encourage private enterprise is to establish
justice, to enforce contracts, to insure domestic peace and
tranquility, to protect private property, and to secure the
blessings of liberty, including economic liberty - which means
to stop putting obstacles in the way of private enterprise.
Henry Hazlitt
I place economy among the first and most important virtues and
public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared.. We must
not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make
our choice between economy and liberty or profusion and
servitude.
Thomas Jefferson
A nation cannot prosper if its members are not fully aware of
the fact that what alone can improve their conditions is more
and better production. And this can only be brought about by
increased saving and capital accumulation.
Ludwig von Mises
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
If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect
for the law.
Winston Churchill
No matter what federal program one selects - Social Security,
Medicare, Medicaid, the drug war, the income tax and the IRS,
education, foreign interventions and wars - they are all a
giant mess.
Jacob G. Hornberger
The government was set to protect man from criminals - and the
Constitution was written to protect man from the government.
Ayn Rand
By a continuing process of inflation, governments can
confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the
wealth of its citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of
overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the
currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic
law on the side of destruction, and it does it in a manner
which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
John Maynard Keynes
The State is absolutely indispensable to the preservation of
law and order, and the promotion of peace and social
cooperation. What is unnecessary and evil, what abridges the
liberty and threatens the true welfare of the individual, is
the State that has usurped excessive powers and grown beyond
its legitimate functions - the super-State, the socialist State,
the redistributive State, in brief, the ironically misnamed
"welfare State".
Henry Hazlitt
It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession.
I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the
first.
Ronald Reagan
The alternative to the market process is government control,
and we know where that principle leads.
Sheldon Richman
Once Congress establishes that one person can live at the
expense of another, it pays for everyone to try to do so.
Walter Williams
The philosophy underlying the system of progressive taxation is
that the income and the wealth of the well-to-do classes can be
freely tapped. What the advocates of these tax rates fail to
realize is that the greater part of the incomes taxed away
would not have been consumed but saved and invested.
Ludwig von Mises
By the very nature of government schooling, the matter of what
goes into school textbooks must necessarily be a political
matter, to be decided by those in political power.
Jacob G. Hornberger
The tendency of government-supported education must be finally
to achieve a government monopoly of education.
Henry Hazlitt
It is certain that many intellectuals envy the higher income
of prosperous businessmen and that these feelings drive them
toward socialism. They believe that the authorities of a
socialist commonwealth would pay them higher salaries than
those that they earn under capitalism.
Ludwig von Mises
Capitalism has enormously raised the economic level of the
masses. It has wiped out whole areas of poverty, and continues
to wipe out more. The so-called "pockets of poverty"
constantly get smaller and fewer.
Henry Hazlitt
So you want to know the future? It's not so hard as it seems.
Expect every government program to fail to achieve its stated
aims - domestic and foreign - and you will hit the mark every
time.
Llewellyn H. Roskwell, Jr.
Congress can raise taxes because it can persuade a sizable
fraction of the populace that someone else will pay.
Milton Friedman
The truth is that the government cannot give if it does not
take from somebody ... It is not in the power of the government
to make everyone more prosperous.
Ludwig von Mises
Inflation is not only unnecessary for economic growth. As long
as it exists it is the enemy of economic growth.
Henry Hazlitt
All present-day governments are fanatically committed to an
easy money policy.
Ludwig von Mises
The market performs miracles so routinely that we take it for
granted. Supermarkets provide 30,000 choices at rock-bottom
prices. We take it for granted that when we stick a piece of
plastic in a wall, cash will come out; that when we give the
same plastic to a stranger, he will rent us a car, and the next
month, VISA will have the accounting correct to the penny. By
contrast, "experts" in the government can't even count the vote
accurately.
John Stossel
Not only is patriotism disdained, the very basis for pride in
one's country and culture is systematically undermined in our
educational institutions at all levels. The achievements of
western civilization are buried in histories that portray every
human sin found here as if they were peculiarities of the west.
Thomas Sowell
The more people expect from government, the more biased they
become against limiting government power.
James Bovard
If the history of welfare teaches us anything, it teaches us
that government money is as addictive as any narcotic.
Michael D. Tanner
If citizens wish to retain their liberty, they cannot assume
that those who seek power over them are honest. Skepticism of
government is one of the most important - and most forgotten -
bulwarks of freedom.
James Bovard
Universities have failed in their function of the pursuit of
academic excellence by having dumbed down classes and granting
degrees to students who are just barely literate and
computationally incompetent.
Walter Williams
The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed
for centuries. It is an invention of civilization.
Unknown
The capitalistic system has lifted mankind out of mass poverty.
It is this system that in the last century, in the last
generation, even the last decade, has acceleratively been
changing the face of the world, and has provided the masses of
mankind with amenities that even kings did not possess or
imagine a few generations ago.
Henry Hazlitt
The essence and the glory of the free market is that individual
firms and businesses, competing on the market, provide an
ever-changing orchestration of efficient and progressive goods
and services: continually improving products and markets,
advancing technology, cutting costs, and meeting changing
consumer demands as swiftly and as efficiently as possible.
Murray N. Rothbard
If the practice persists of covering government deficits with the
issue of notes, then the day will come without fail, sooner or
later, when the monetary systems of those nations pursuing this
course will break down completely. The purchasing power of the
monetary unit will decline more and more, until finally it
disappears completely.
Ludwig von Mises
The essence of Keynesianism is its complete failure to conceive
the role that saving and capital accumulation play in the
improvement of economic conditions.
Ludwig von Mises
No longer are Republicans arguing with Democrats about whether
government should be big or small. Instead they are at odds
over what kind of big government the U.S. should have.
Janet Hook
One of the bitter ironies of the 20th century was that
communism, which began as an egalitarian doctrine accusing
capitalism of selfishness and calloused sacrifices of others,
became in power a system whose selfishness and callousness
toward others made the sins of capitalism pale.
Thomas Sowell
If there is to be no loss whatever of dignity or self-respect
in getting and staying on relief, then there can be no gain in
dignity or self-respect in making some sacrifices to keep off.
Henry Hazlitt
There is no other planning for freedom and general welfare than
to let the market system work.
Ludwig von Mises
Redistribution divided society into two social classes: the
beneficiaries of transfer, who are calling for even more; and
the victims, who submit unwillingly. It could hardly fail to
injure social peace and harmony.
Hans F. Sennholz
A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass
of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he
chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between
capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social
systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the
disintegration of society. Socialism in not an alternative to
capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men
can live as human beings.
Ludwig von Mises
Money is color-blind, race-blind, sex-blind, degree-blind and
couldn't care less who brought you up or in what circumstances.
Felix Dennis
Government planning always involves compulsion.
Henry Hazlitt
Big-government conservatives display a great naivete about the
way government works. They appear to believe that limited
programs will not grow or see their original purposes
corrupted. But little in the history of government justifies
such faith.
Michael D. Tanner
The essential function of the State is to maintain peace,
justice, law and order, and to protect the individual citizen
against aggression, violence, theft and fraud.
Henry Hazlitt
Government intervention in the economy - through taxes,
regulation and, most importantly, currency inflation - causes
distortions and misallocations of capital that must eventually
be unwound. The distortions degrade the general standard of
living, and the economy goes into a recession (call that an
incomplete cleansing). Or it goes into a depression wherein
the entire sickly structure comes unglued.
Doug Casey
The only source from which an entrepreneur's profits stem is
his ability to anticipate better than other people the future
demand of the customers.
Ludwig von Mises
You are much surer that you are doing good when you pay money
to those who work, as a recompense of their labor, than when
you give money merely in charity.
Samuel Johnson
Tyranny is a political corollary of socialism, as
representative government is the political corollary of the
market economy.
Ludwig von Mises
The liberals say they are for civil liberties and personal
freedom, but they continue to advocate government regulation of
business, redistribution of wealth, and various forms of social
engineering to manipulate human relationships and attitudes.
Richard M. Ebeling
The State, by relieving idleness, improvidence, or misconduct
from the punishment, and by depriving abstinence and foresight
of the reward, which have been provided for them by nature, may
indeed destroy wealth, but most certainly will aggravate
poverty.
Nassau Senior
No matter whether it is their intention or not, almost anything
that the rich can legally do tends to help the poor. The
spending of the rich gives employment to the poor. But the
saving of the rich, and their investment of these savings in
the means of production, gives just as much employment, and in
addition makes that employment constantly more productive and
more highly paid, while it also increases and cheapens the
production of necessities and amenities for the masses.
Henry Hazlitt
Under capitalism the common man enjoys amenities which in ages
gone by were unknown and therefore inaccessible even to the
richest people.
Ludwig von Mises
The welfare state has bred a generation of obnoxious, drug-
addicted criminals and ne'er-do-wells. It has also,
incidently, burdened what was the world's biggest, most dynamic
economy with the dead weight of an obstructive and vastly
expensive state machine.
Martin Durkin
Highly graduated taxation realizes most completely the supreme
danger of democracy, creating a state of things in which one
class imposes on another burdens which it is not asked to
share, and impels the State into vast schemes of extravagance,
under the belief that the whole costs will be thrown upon
others.
W. E. H. Lecky
Assume that a surgeon has discovered how to do a brain surgery,
that he can do only one a month, that 1000 persons a year need
such an operation if they are to survive. How is the surgeon's
scarce resource to be allocated? Charge whatever price is
necessary to adjust supply to demand, say $50,000! "For
shame," some will cry. "Your market system will save only
wealthy people." For the moment, yes. But soon there will be
hundreds of surgeons who will acquire the same skill; and, as
in the case of the once scarce and expensive "miracle drugs,"
the price will then be within the reach of all.
Leonard E. Read
Under capitalism men provide for themselves, while under
Socialism they are provided for.
Ludwig von Mises
Once a bureau is created, its staff becomes a tenacious
political interest group, well placed to defend its budget and
to make a case for expanding its activities.
Robert Higgs
The truth is that the characteristic feature of capitalism was
and is mass production for the needs of the masses.
Ludwig von Mises
Big business depends entirely on the patronage of those who buy
its products: the biggest enterprise loses its power and its
influence when it loses its customers.
Ludwig von Mises
By substituting the judgment of bureaucrats and political
interests for the private knowledge of millions of
entrepreneurs seeking the most productive use of labor and
capital, government misallocates scarce resources that would
be better spent increasing private-sector productivity -- and
along with it private incomes.
Jason Lewis
Those whose hardships are set forth in pamphlets and proclaimed
in sermons and speeches which echo throughout society, are
assumed to be all worthy souls, grievously wronged; and none
of them are thought of as bearing the penalties of their
misdeeds.
Herbert Spencer
Government means always coercion and compulsion and is by
necessity the opposite of liberty.
Ludwig von Mises
Government doesn't work. You work, I work, Federal Express
works, Alcoholics Anonymous works, but government doesn't.
Harry Browne
Can anyone recall the last time a government bureaucracy declared
that it had fulfilled its mission and now should be abolished?
Michael D. Tanner
Most change in America doesn't come from politicians. It comes
from inventing things and creating. The telephone, the
telegraph, the computer, all those things didn't come from
government. Our world is going to get better and better, as
long as we keep the politicians from screwing it up.
David Boaz
Do American voters know that the unprecedented improvement in
their standard of living that the last hundred years has
brought was the result of the steady rise in the per-head quota
of capital invested? Do they realize that every measure leading
to capital decumulation jeopardizes that prosperity?
Ludwig von Mises
The entitlement mentality so carefully cultivated by liberal
academics, politicians, clergymen, and journalists continues to
corrode the self-sufficiency that once defined the American
character.
Mona Charen
The sad truth is that one of the reasons people have to go on
relief in the first place is that they have been as incompetent
or heedless in spending money as in earning it. The worst
thing one can give a spendthrift, a drug addict, or a
compulsive gambler is cash.
Henry Hazlitt
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious
encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without
understanding.
Louis Brandeis
The issue is always the same: the government or the market.
There is no third solution.
Ludwig von Mises
In public administration there is no connection between revenue
and expenditure.
Ludwig von Mises
There is no question that if one were to ask whether we
Americans are moving towards more liberty or more government
control over our lives, the answer would unambiguously be the
later -- more government control over our lives. We might have
reached a point where the trend is irreversible and that is a
tragedy for if liberty is lost in America, it will be lost for
all times and all places.
Walter Williams
The same government that requires a taxpaying citizen to
document every statement on his tax return decrees that
questioning a welfare applicant demeans and humiliates him.
Ronald Reagan
The first socialists were the intellectuals; they, and not the
masses, are the backbone of Socialism.
Ludwig von Mises
Liberty in the United States will never be reestablished so
long as elites and masses alike look to the president to
perform supernatural feats and therefore tolerate a virtually
unlimited exercise of presidential power. Until we can restore
limited, constitutional government in this country, God save us
from great presidents.
Robert Higgs
Time and again, experience has shown that while private
enterprise, carried on in an environment of open competition,
delivers the best products and services at the best price,
government intervention stifles initiative, subsidizes
inefficiency, and raises costs.
Burton F. Folsom, Jr.
The more power government has to provide things, the more power
it has to dictate terms.
Sheldon Richman
In a market, goods and services are exchanged through a myriad
complex of voluntary transactions, each made to the mutual
benefit of those engaging in the transaction. The costs of bad
choices are borne by those who made them.
Jeffrey A Singer
During the 1930's, some of the leading intellectuals in America
condemned our economic system and pointed to the centrally
planned Soviet economy as a model --- all this at a time when
literally millions of people were starving to death in the
Soviet Union, from a famine in a country with some of the
richest farmland in Europe and historically a large exporter of
food.
Thomas Sowell
The freedom of individuals from compulsion or coercion never
was, and is not now, the normal state of human affairs. The
normal state for the ordinary person is tyranny, arbitrary
control and abuse mainly by their own government.
Walter Williams
The increase of social wealth is not accompanied by a
diminishing number of capitalist magnates, but by an
increasing number of capitalists of all degrees.
Eduard Bernstein
The prerequisite for more economic equality in the world is
industrialization. And this is possible only through increased
capital investment, increased capital accumulation.
Ludwig von Mises
The resources that government extracts from the private sector
to pay for itself are resources that are not available for the
private sector to use in producing more goods and services.
When the federal government takes money out of our pockets, we
have less money to spend or save. When the federal government
takes money from business, it has less money to use for
investment, research, or payroll.
Michael D. Tanner
If we cannot return to fiscal integrity because the public
prefers profusion and prodigality over balanced budgets, we
cannot escape paying the price, which is ever lower incomes and
standards of living for all.
Hans F. Sennholz
Those politicians, professors and union bosses who curse big
business are fighting for a lower standard of living.
Ludwig von Mises
Government schools can go for decades delivering low-quality
services, and what is the result? The people who manage it
earn higher pay. It's nearly impossible to fire the
incompetents. And, taxpayers, who support the service, are
given higher tax bills.
Walter Williams
Once we realize that government doesn't work, we'll know that
the only way to improve government is by reducing its size --
by doing away with laws, by getting rid of programs, by making
government spend and tax less, by reducing government as far as
we can.
Harry Browne
The world has always been betrayed not by scoundrels but by
decent men with bad ideas.
Sudney J. Harris
Taxes are necessary. But the system of discriminatory taxation
universally accepted under the misleading name of progressive
taxation of income and inheritance is not a mode of taxation.
It is a mode of disguised expropriation of the successful
capitalists and entrepreneurs.
Ludwig von Mises
We have more than a century of experience to show that ever
bigger, ever more expensive, ever more intrusive government
simply doesn't work. Big government has not eliminated or even
significantly reduced poverty. It has not made our health care
or retirement systems better. It has not improved education.
It has not solved any of the myriad problems our society faces.
Indeed, more often than not, it has made those problems worse.
Michael D. Tanner
A government big enough to give you everything you want is also
big enough to take away everything you have.
Barry Goldwater
When individual enterprise is free and unhampered, profit-and-
loss calculations set precise limits to a businessman's
temptations to expand his services ... a government agency or
bureau faces no such limitation. Its services, no matter how
valuable they may be, have no market price and, therefore,
cannot be subjected to profit-and-loss accounting.
Hans F. Sennholz
The more "adequate" we make relief, the more people we are
going to find willing to get on it and stay on it indefinitely.
The more we try to make sure that everyone really in need of
relief gets it, the more certain we can be that we are also
giving it to people who neither need nor deserve it.
Henry Hazlitt
No currency can hold up in the face of an economy that survives
on borrowed money and debt.
Richard Russell
Government has no wealth of its own. Before it gives anything
to anyone, it must take from those who produced it.
John Stossel
Continued inflation inevitably leads to catastrophe.
Ludwig von Mises
The Customer is God, and the market decides everything.
Chinese slogan
One of the worse features of all the plans for sharing the wealth
and equalizing or guaranteeing incomes is that they lose sight
of the conditions and institutions that are necessary to create
wealth and income in the first place.
Henry Hazlitt
Experience shows that nothing is operated with less economy and
with more waste of labor and material of every kind than public
services and undertakings. Private enterprise on the other
hand naturally induces the owner to work with the greatest
economy in his own interest.
Ludwig von Mises
The average American worker enjoys amenities for which Croesus,
Crassus, the Medici, and Louis XIV would have envied him.
Ludwig von Mises
The uniform, constant, uninterrupted effort of every man to
better his condition .... is frequently powerful enough to
maintain the natural progress of things toward improvement, in
spite of the extravagance of government, and of the greatest
errors of administration.
Adam Smith
Our government officials create too many laws and spend too much
money. It's all because they claim to have the best interests
of the people at heart when in fact, knowingly or unknowingly,
they do not.
Jack Crooks
There can be little doubt that many egalitarians are motivated
at least partially by envy.
Henry Hazlitt
The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no
more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of
incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils which
mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments.
The state can be and has often been in the course of history
the main source of mischief and disaster.
Ludwig von Mises
The best reason to diminish social programs is not to put more
money in people's pockets but to put more responsibility in
people's pockets.
Mark Steyn
Society is best served when the means of production are in the
possession of those who know how to use them best.
Ludwig von Mises
The vital consideration of incentives is almost systematically
overlooked in the proposals of agitators for more and bigger
government welfare schemes. We should all be concerned about
the plight of the poor and unfortunate. But the hard two-part
question that any plan for relieving poverty must answer is:
How can we mitigate the penalties of failure and misfortune
without undermining the incentives to effort and success.
Henry Hazlitt
We have to remember man's natural tendency to satisfy his
desires with the minimum of effort to realize how political
power will be utilized.
Frank Chodorov
Whether we want to own up to it or not, the welfare state has
done what Jim Crow, gross discrimination and poverty could not
have done. It has contributed to the breakdown of the black
family structure and has helped establish a set of values alien
to traditional values of high moral standards, hard work and
achievement.
Walter Williams
The private economy, not government, creates opportunity.
Government should just deliver basic services well and then get
out of the private sector's way.
Steve Malanga
A fact rarely suspected, let alone understood, is that
businessmen are by no means the chief beneficiaries of the free
market, private ownership, limited government way of life.
Many businesses ventures fail entirely. Who then are the
beneficiaries? The masses!
Leonard E. Read
The brutality of communism was quickly swept under history's
rug, in large part because so many on the left had embraced it
as the solution to humankind's problems.
Cal Thomas
On the unhampered market there prevails an irresistible tendency
to employ every factor of production for the best possible
satisfaction of the most urgent needs of the consumers. If
the government interferes with this process, it can only impair
satisfaction; it can never improve it.
Ludwig von Mises
Competition always tends to bring about the most economical and
efficient method of production. Those who are most successful
in this competition will acquire more capital to increase their
production still further; those who are least successful will
be forced out of the field. So capitalist production tends to
be drawn into the hands of the most efficient.
Henry Hazlitt
Government income redistribution programs produce the same
result as theft. In fact, that's what a thief does; he
redistributes income. The difference between government and
thievery is mostly a matter of legality.
Walter Williams
Capitalism gives a poor person an opportunity to become rich.
It does not lock people into the condition of poverty.
Perry Gresham
We are so accustomed to the miracle of private enterprise that
we habitually take it for granted. But how does private
industry solve the incredibly complex problem of turning out
tens of thousands of different goods and services in the
proportions in which they are wanted by the public? ... It
solves these problems through the institutions of private
property, competition, the free market, and the existence of
money -- through the interrelations of supply and demand, costs
and prices, profits and losses.
Henry Hazlitt
The most important thing to remember is that inflation is not
an act of God, that inflation is not a catastrophe of the
elements or a disease that comes like the plague. Inflation is
a policy.
Ludwig von Mises
There is no reason why capitalists and entrepreneurs should be
ashamed of earning profits.
Ludwig von Mises
Government is so big today that more than half of the
population gets a major part of its income from the state.
John Stossel
Throughout history governments have been chronically short of
revenue. The reason should be clear; unlike you and me,
governments do not produce useful goods and services that they
can sell on the market; governments, rather than producing and
selling services, live parasitically off the market and off
society.
Murray N. Rothbard
Social security is a fraudulent scheme in which the government
collects money from you for your retirement -- and immediately
spends the money on something else.
Harry Browne
He who saves money does not keep it under a mattress, as people
did in the mercantilist era, but invests it to produce a profit
or to yield interest. Either he puts it into real property or
into mortgages, and thereby favors the expansion of housing and
the employment of construction workers; or he invests it in
equities and buys shares of productive enterprises, which are
also thus enabled to expand; or he lends it at interest to
entrepreneurs, with the same result for the general well-being.
Saving and capital accumulation, then, are the great factors
making for an increase in production and a consequent abundance
of jobs and a lowering of prices.
Faustino Ballve
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or
the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to
their own interest.
Adam Smith
Sometimes any issue that hits the television news seems to
become an issue that must be addressed by the federal
government. And like busybodies everywhere, Congress can't
help peering in our windows and telling us how to live our
lives.
Michael D. Tanner
The envious are more likely to be mollified by seeing others
deprived of some advantage than by gaining it for themselves.
It is not what they lack that chiefly troubles them, but what
others have.
Henry Hazlitt
In a game there are winners and losers. But a business deal is
always advantageous for both parties. If both the buyer and
the seller were not to consider the transaction as the most
advantageous action they could choose under the prevailing
conditions, they would not enter into the deal.
Ludwig von Mises
Unlike every other person and institution in society,
government obtains its revenue from coercion, from taxation.
Murray N. Rothbard
Capitalism is the greatest system ever created for alleviating
general human misery, and yet it breeds ingratitude.
Jonah Goldberg
What made some enterprises develop into "big business" was
precisely their success in filling best the demand of the
masses.
Ludwig von Mises
Capitalists have the tendency to move towards those countries
in which there is plenty of labor available and in which labor
is reasonable. And by the fact that they bring capital into
these countries, they bring about a trend towards higher wage
rates.
Ludwig von Mises
The typical local government agenda has these goals: finding
ways to get more tax dollars, improving the pay and benefits
packages of those who work for government, hiring more staff,
securing additional powers for those who run the government,
implementing more rules that dictate how citizens can live
while reducing the number of rules that govern those who run
the government.
Steven Greenhut
Government bailouts are like potato chips: You can't stop with
just one.
Thomas Sowell
When have handouts ever worked? In the United States, we
learned that welfare for our own citizens not only turned into
a debilitating crutch, it created a more or less permanent
underclass.
Linda Chavez
When any welfare scheme is being proposed, its political
sponsors always dwell on what a generous and compassionate
government should pay to Paul; they neglect to mention that
this additional money must be seized from Peter.
Henry Hazlitt
One of the happiest consequences of the absence of government
... is the development of individual strength that inevitably
follows.
Alex de Tocqueville
The better an entrepreneur succeeds, the more is he vilified
and the more is he soaked by taxation.
Ludwig von Mises
Laws provide against injury from others; but not from
ourselves. God himself will not save men against their wills.
Thomas Jefferson
What governments call international monetary cooperation is
concerted action for the sake of credit expansion.
Ludwig von Mises
Soaking the rich would not only be profoundly immoral, it would
drastically penalize the very virtues: thrift, business
foresight, and investment, that have brought about our
remarkable standard of living. It would truly be killing the
goose that lays the golden eggs.
Murray N. Rothbard
No one should ever expect that any logical argument or any
experience could ever shake the almost religious fervor of
those who believe in salvation through spending and credit
expansion.
Ludwig von Mises
There is no use whatever trying to help people who do not help
themselves. You cannot push anyone up a ladder.
Andrew Carnegie
It will be of little avail to the people that laws are made by
men of their choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they
cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood
.. that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what
it will be tomorrow.
James Madison
Most Americans, who think Congress has a right to do anything
for which they can get a majority vote, ignore the clearly
written constitutional restraints on Congress.
Walter Williams
If people do not consume their whole incomes, the non-consumed
surplus can be invested. It increases the amount of capital
goods available and thereby makes it possible to embark upon
projects which could not be executed before.
Ludwig von Mises
The last few decades mark the first time in their history that
America's institutions of higher learning have become a haven
for extremists.
David Horowitz
The human race divides politically into those who want people
to be controlled and those who have no such desire.
Robert A. Heinlein
Today, the law is a crazy quilt of provisions and clauses that
very often have little to do with securing general happiness
and instead are designed to secure the particular happiness of
various advocacy groups, politicians and bureaucrats.
Joel Miller
Think about it: we went into slavery pagans; we came out
Christians. We went into slavery pieces of property; we came
out American citizens. We went into slavery with chains
clanking about our wrists; we came out with the American ballot
in our hands...
Booker T. Washington
Some people regard private enterprise as a cow they can milk.
Not enough see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.
Winston Churchill
There is far more danger in public than in private monopoly, for
when government goes into business it can always shift its
losses to the taxpayers.
Thomas Jefferson
Government cannot be put on a businesslike basis because it
lacks the profit-and-loss test available to business on the
market. Thus it doesn't know when to stop, short of a
disastrous setback, cannot calculate its costs, and so on.
Joseph R. Stromberg
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.
Winston Churchill
Markets are nimble and efficient, gathering the collective but
dispersed intelligence of the economy's players and
communicating up-to-the-minute realities of prices, product
availability, etc. Government is typically cumbersome,
plodding, and slow.
Joel Miller
The only real cure for poverty is production.
Henry Hazlitt
The crucial question for any policy is not what are its
intentions but what are its effects?
Walter Williams
Markets work well at what they are supposed to do; governments
work badly at what they are supposed to do.
Joseph R. Stromberg
Under capitalism everybody provides for their own needs by
serving others.
Ludwig von Mises
Left-wing social policies sicken our behavior and corrupt our
culture. People bend principles and sacrifice integrity to get
as much as they can from the government. Giveaway programs
encourage every imaginable sort of cheating and dishonesty.
Wheeling and dealing in food stamps is a way of life. Lying and
fraud are commonplace. Whenever you're dependent on the money,
the end justifies the means.
James Cook
The government and its chiefs do not have the powers of the
mystical Santa Claus. They cannot spend except by taking out
of the pockets of some people for the benefit of others.
Ludwig von Mises
The U.S. Constitution may be flawed, but it is a whole lot
better than what we have now.
Unknown
The more government does, the greater chance that its efforts
will be tilted toward a particular group's good, instead of the
common good.
Joel Miller
No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the
people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited;
the words "no" and "not" employed in restraint of government
power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the
Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights.
Edmund A Opitz
The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised
over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is
to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or
moral, is not sufficient.
John Stuart Mill
Inflation is the true opium of the people and it is
administered to them by anticapitalist governments and parties.
Ludwig von Mises
The two pillars of democratic government are the primacy of the
law and the budget.
Ludwig von Mises
There are many farm handouts; but let's call them what they
really are: a form of legalized theft. Essentially, a
congressman tells his farm constituency, "Vote for me. I'll use
my office to take another American's money and give it to you".
Walter Williams
We are ever aware that politics is an ugly struggle that
determines "who gets what, when, and how". It is the favorite
occupation of people who serve special interests, who have axes
to grind, and public careers to advance. It is a game in which
benefits are bestowed according to political skill and
connection, rather than merit.
Hans F. Sennholz
Except for talk radio, liberals pretty much control the
culture.
Bernard Goldberg
I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the
means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not
making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of
it.
Benjamin Franklin
Government does not grow by seizing our freedoms, but by
assuming our responsibilities.
Michael Cloud
Shortsighted and impatient efforts to wipe out poverty by
severing the connection between effort and reward can only lead
to the growth of a totalitarian state, and destroy the economic
progress that this country has so dearly bought.
Henry Hazlitt
As soon as the economic freedom which the market economy grants
to its members is removed, all political liberties and bills
of rights become humbug.
Ludwig von Mises
Diluting the money supply with paper is the moral equivalent of
diluting the milk supply with water.
Henry Hazlitt
If government goes beyond securing liberty and instead violates
it through regulation, redistribution, and planning, then
citizens are victims of legal plunder.
Richard M. Ebeling
It is not the function of Government to keep the citizen from
falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep
the Government from falling into error.
Robert H. Jackson
If capitalism worked as the socialists think an economic system
ought to work, and provided a constant equality of living
conditions for all, regardless of whether a man was able or not,
resourceful or not, diligent or not, thrifty or not, if
capitalism put no premium on resourcefulness and effort and no
penalty on idleness or vice, it would produce only an equality
of destitution.
Milton Friedman
I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent
the government from wasting the labors of the people under the
pretense of taking care of them.
Thomas Jefferson
Most new regulations are subject to little genuine scrutiny or
oversight, and the average person would be hard-pressed to stay
informed about them, let alone do much to oppose them should he
find them worrisome. As Hayek insisted, the law is supposed to
be simple and easily known by all who are ruled by it. Such is
not the case today.
Joel Miller
In the United States how did we go from having no role for the
federal government in farming to having government intertwined
in all aspects of farming from planting to harvesting to
selling crops?
Burton W. Folsom, Jr.
The ideal government of all reflective men, from Aristotle
onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which
barely escapes being no government at all.
H. L. Mencken
In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance
of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance
of people with college degrees.
Thomas Sowell
The tendency of welfare spending in the United States has been
to increase at an exponential rate.
Henry Hazlitt
The concept of a "just" or "fair" price is devoid of any
scientific meaning; it is a disguise for wishes, a striving for
a state of affairs different from reality.
Ludwig von Mises
Although it seems that the political classes, along with their
intellectual and journalistic allies, are unable (and
unwilling) to permit themselves to receive even a basic
education when it comes to prices, profits and markets, many
people outside those circles are not as intellectually and
morally obtuse.
William L. Anderson
Every extension of the functions and powers of the State
beyond its primary duty of maintaining peace and justice should
be scrutinized with jealous vigilance.
Ludwig von Mises
If our country is to survive and prosper, we must summon the
courage to condemn and reject the liberal agenda, and we had
better do it soon.
Walter Williams
American colleges and universities are hothouses of hypocrisy,
and the principal exhibit is that while their spokesmen talk
endlessly about their commitment to openness, tolerance,
critical thinking, diversity, and so on, many of them have
adopted policies designed to stifle the expression of unpopular
sentiments and empower certain groups to punish others for
having the temerity to speak their minds.
George C. Leef
The drum-fire of propaganda that the Fed is manning the
ramparts against the menace of inflation brought about by
others is nothing less than a deceptive shell game. The
culprit solely responsible for inflation, the Federal Reserve,
is continually engaged in raising a hue-and-cry about
"inflation", for which virtually everyone in society seems to
be responsible. What we are seeing is the old ploy by the
robber who starts shouting "Stop thief!" and runs down the
street pointing at others.
Murray N. Rothbard
Governments everywhere, including here in the United States,
have created ever-expanding bureaucracies that regulate nearly
every aspect of our lives.
Richard M. Ebeling
Do you expect the government to educate your children? To
protect you from terrorists? To guarantee your job? To protect
you against corporate fraud? The record speaks loudly. It
can't.
John A Pugsley
"Public interest criteria" does not mean criteria that the public
decides are in its interest. It means that the elite - via
various appointed bodies - decide what the public's interest is
for them.
Mark Steyn
My indictment of big government is that it is bad because it
attacks liberty, prosperity, progress, harmony, and morality.
Thanks to big government, we have significantly less of all
those good things than we would if we had been able to keep the
government right-sized. Big government is cancerous. Like a
cancer it hurts the body and tends to spread doing more and
more harm as it grows. It is time for some radical surgery.
George C. Leef
The crying need today is not for more laws, but for fewer. The
world must be saved from its saviors. If the friends of
liberty and law could have only one slogan it should be: Stop
the remedies!
Henry Hazlitt
It is the greatest folly of which a man can be capable to sit
down with a slate and pencil to plan out a new social world.
William Graham Sumner
It is difficult to imagine greater government control of a
person's life than forcing the person to give half or more of
his honorably earned money to the state under threat of being
imprisoned.
Dennis Prager
The American Dream was not about government's taking huge sums
of money (under the label of "taxation") from citizens by
force. The American Dream was about individualism and the
opportunity to achieve success without interference from
others.
Robert Ringer
The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in
providing more silk stocking for queens but in bringing them
within the reach of factory girls in return for a steadily
decreasing amount of effort.
Joseph Schumpeter
Reason and ideas determine the course of human events. What is
needed to stop the trend toward socialism and despotism is
common sense and moral courage.
Ludwig von Mises
It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice. I
consider that the real vice is making losses.
Winston Churchill
In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented
car.
Lawrence Summers
The government's War on Poverty has transformed poverty from
short-term misfortune into a career choice.
Harry Browne
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of
making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands
of people who pay no price for being wrong.
Thomas Sowell
Under both the welfare state and communism, the responsibility
for the welfare, security, and prosperity of the people is
presumed to rest with the government.
Leonard E. Read
The trouble with liberals is twofold: They have a horrible
blind spot with respect to moral principles and they have an
abysmal understanding of economic principles.
Jacob G. Hornberger
The economic miracle that has been the United States was not
produced by socialized enterprises, by government-upon-industry
cartels, or by centralized economic planning. It was produced
by private enterprises in a profit-and-loss system. And losses
were at least as important in weeding out failures, as profits
in fostering successes. Let government succor failures, and we
shall be headed for stagnation and decline.
Milton Friedman
Norman Rockwell spent his career painting pictures that helped
people understand their own feelings .. pictures that enriched
their own experience and celebrated their own lives. But the
art establishment branded him an "illustrator", a sentimental
one at that. Real artists, they said were doing art for art's
sake, not for the sake of the bourgeois public. Real artists
were putting swiggles, smears or daubs of paint on the canvas.
They were doing "innovative" and "creative" work. If they were
hideous and grotesque, well, that's what life really is!
Bill Bonner
The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those
who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
Thomas Jefferson
A hundred welfare programs, spending more and more billions,
lead to chronic budget deficits, which lead to increased paper-
money issues, which lead to higher prices.
Henry Hazlett
Little else is required to carry a state to the highest degree
of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes,
and a tolerable administration of justice.
Adam Smith
Arbitrary government power is being multiplied daily by the
now practically unchallenged assumption that wherever there is
any problem of any kind to be solved, government is the agency
to step in and solve it.
Henry Hazlitt
Whenever there is some trouble in any area of the economy, the
simplest solution to many people is "Let the government fix
it." Yet .. every time the government uses its money or its
power to favor this group or that ... the net result is such a
web of supports, subsidies, interventions and controls that it
is almost impossible for a nation to find its way back into a
dynamic system of really free enterprise.
Lawrence Fertig
The poor are the very lifeblood of the left, attracting
activists, support among the intelligencia, and - perhaps most
important - allowing the left to indulge in self-congratulation
as people who "care". But, if they really cared, they would
want to know what the facts are and what the actual
consequences of their various nostrums are.
Thomas Sowell
Our world today is in the grip of anti-capitalism. State
bureaucracies ruling over anti-market policies have grown into
ideological and political elites who arrogantly presume to know
and dictate how we should all live and work.
Richard M. Ebeling
Once the premise is accepted that poverty is never the fault of
the poor but the fault of "society", or of "the capitalist
system", then there is no definable limit to be set on relief,
and politicians who want to be elected or reelected will
compete with each other in proposing new "welfare" programs to
fill some hitherto "unmet need".
Henry Hazlett
The middle-of-the-road policy is not an economic system that
can last. It is a method for the realization of socialism by
installments.
Ludwig von Mises
Fundamental economic laws are all, in the end, derived from the
laws of nature. The laws of nature are what they are. They
are not up for alteration by any human act or fancy and
certainly not up for alteration or change by any legislative
action.
Bill Buckler
We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes
non-work.
Milton Friedman
The only source of the generation of additional capital goods
is saving.
Ludwig von Mises
There is no free lunch.
Milton Friedman
It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the "right" to
education, the "right" to health care, the "right" to food and
housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't
rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for
human cattle.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Have you noticed how statists are constantly "reforming" their
own reform. Health-care reform. Welfare reform. Tax reform.
The very fact that they're always busy "reforming" is an
implicit admission that they didn't get it right the first 50
times.
Lawrence W. Reed
Capitalism has created the highest standard of living ever
known on earth. The evidence is incontrovertible... Yet those
who are loudest in proclaiming their desire to eliminate
poverty are loudest in denouncing capitalism. Man's well-being
is not their goal.
Ayn Rand
Another false remedy for poverty is the progressive income tax,
as well as a very heavy burden of capital gains taxes, and
corporate income taxes. All of these have the effect of
discouraging production, investment, and capital accumulation.
To that extent they must prolong rather than cure poverty.
Henry Hazlitt
Liberals love to say things like, "We are just asking everyone
to pay their fair share." But government is not about asking.
It is about telling. The difference is fundamental. It is the
difference between making love and being raped, between working
and being a slave. The Internal Revenue service is not asking
anyone to do anything. It confiscates your assets and puts you
behind bars if you don't pay.
Thomas Sowell
Through private investment capitalism kept raising the
productivity of labor to new heights. Parents were able to
earn enough so their offspring did not have to join the work
force at an early age. This produced something unique in
history: childhood, a time when the young could experience the
innocence of play and the opportunity of schooling before
entering the world of work.
Richard M. Ebeling
It is important to remember that government interference always
means either violent action or the threat of such action..
taxes are paid because the taxpayers are afraid of offering
resistance to the tax gatherers. They know that any disobedience
or resistance is hopeless. As long as this is the state of
affairs, the government is able to collect the money that it
wants to spend. Government is in the last resort the employer
of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison
guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is
the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and
imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government are
asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.
Ludwig von Mises
Bureaucracies typically move slowly, clumsily, and without
much regard for the wants and needs of the people they are
supposedly serve.
Joel Miller
It continues to defy explanation why liberals, who
theoretically love liberty, equality, tolerance and moderation,
should find so much to despise in their own country, which
represents the fullest expression of those virtues anywhere on
the globe.
Mona Charen
It is much cheaper and enormously more profitable for the
special interests to purchase the regulatory favors of
Washington's political harlots than to compete in a fair,
unsubsidized marketplace.
Lee Robinson
The masses favor socialism because they trust the socialist
propaganda of the intellectuals. The intellectuals, not the
populace, are molding public opinion.
Ludwig von Mises
For years we have been told that all the public school system
needs is more money. For years we have watched its per pupil
spending rise, with little visible effect on quality. It is
time to try something new.
David Friedman
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You
cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot
help men permanently by doing for them when they could and
should do for themselves.
Abraham Lincoln
Unions say, "education is too important to be left to the
vagaries of the market." The opposite is true. Education is
too important to be left to the calcified union/government
monopoly.
John Stossel
The private sector is creating a miracle a day, even as the
stuff that government attempts is failing left and right.
Llewlllyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
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
Somehow, the fact that more poor people are on welfare,
receiving 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
All people, entrepreneurs as well as non-entrepreneurs, look
askance upon any profits earned by other people. Envy is a
common weakness of men. People are loath to acknowledge the
fact that they themselves could have earned profits if they had
displayed the same foresight and judgment the successful
businessman did.
Ludwig von Mises
The proliferation of bureaucrats and its invariable
accompaniment, much heavier tax levies on the productive part
of the population, are the recognizable signs, not of a great,
but of a decaying society.
William Chamberlain
Capital is not a free gift of God or of nature. It is the
outcome of a provident restriction of consumption on the part
of man. It is created and increased by saving and maintained
by the abstention from dissaving.
Ludwig von Mises
Abused and neglected children have paid the price for
liberalism's tendency to sentimentalize the poor.
Mona Charen
There is one, and only one, social responsibility of business -
to use its resources and engage in activities designed to
increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of
the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition
without deception or fraud.
Milton Friedman
The harm done by ordinary criminals, murderers, gangsters, and
thieves is negligible in comparison with the agony inflicted
upon human beings by the professional do-gooders, who attempt
to set themselves up as gods on earth and who would ruthlessly
force their views on all others - with the abiding assurance
that the ends justify the means.
Henry Weaver
The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single
sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never
under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to
his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to
the whole community. Always attribute his success to the
exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of
others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own
failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure
of anyone else may be due to his own defects - his laziness,
incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity.
Henry Hazlitt
It's a peculiar thing about liberals. When it comes to middle-
class people who are fully capable of caring for themselves,
liberals seek to undermine their independence in every way
possible. With seductive "entitlements" like guaranteed
retirement, health care, nutrition, education and jobs,
liberals attempt to lure the middle class into dependence on
the state. But when it comes to those who are truly
incompetent, those whose mental afflictions render them unable
to manage their lives at all, liberals are suddenly transformed
into absolutists for personal autonomy.
Mona Charen
The army of relief and other subsidy recipients will continue
to grow, and the solvency of the government will become
increasing untenable, as long as part of the population can
vote to force the other part to support it.
Henry Hazlitt
The improvement of well-being brought about by capitalism made
it possible for the common man to save and thus to become in a
modest way himself a capitalist. A considerable part of the
capital working in American business is the counterpart of the
saving of the masses.
Ludwig von Mises
The idea that a citizen's property can be taken by the
government solely for private use is extremely misguided. In
fact, it's just plain wrong.
John Allison
The past seventy five years have seen the growth of government
from a relatively small entity charged with defending the
borders, adjudicating disputes, and delivering mail, to a
bloated nightmare creature whose tentacles reach into every
corner of our existence.
Doug Hornig
... liberals force lower middle-class families, who love their
children, to dispatch them to ghetto schools dominated by gangs of
fatherless boys bearing knives.
George Guilder
A day never passes without some ardent reformer or group of
reformers suggesting some new government intervention, some new
statist scheme to fill some alleged "need" or relieve some
alleged distress.
Henry Hazlitt
The Welfare State is merely a method for transforming the
market economy step by step into socialism.
Ludwig von Mises
We need laws written by people who have confronted life in the
real world, not in the sheltered world of trust fund recipients
or the insulated cocoon of academia.
Thomas Sowell
The bigger government has grown, the greater squeeze it has
placed on America's families, finances, and freedom. And that
squeeze has directly impacted the pursuit of happiness for the
worse.
Joel Miller
Hatred of producers of wealth still flourishes and has become,
in fact, the racism of the intelligencia.
George Guilder
Socialists will often talk as if some form of superbly equalized
destitution were preferable to "maldistributed" plenty. A
national income that is rapidly growing in absolute terms for
practically everyone will be deplored because it is making the
rich richer.
Henry Hazlitt
I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save
money, but because I wish to save people. The men and women of
this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of the
government. Every dollar we carelessly waste means that their
life will be so much more meager... Economy is idealism in its
most practical form.
Calvin Coolidge
Reaching into some else's pocket to assist one's fellow man
hardly qualifies as charity.
Walter Williams
Welfare policies never attain those - allegedly beneficial -
ends which the government and the self-styled progressives who
advanced them wanted to attain, but - on the contrary - bring
about a state of affairs which - from the very point of view of
the government and its supporters - is even more
unsatisfactory than the previous state of affairs they wanted
to "improve".
Ludwig von Mises
Property is the fruit of labor. Property is desirable, is a
positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows
that others may become rich and hence is just encouragement to
industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down
the house of another, but let him work diligently to build one
for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be
safe from violence.
Abraham Lincoln
The pseudo-liberals monopolize the teaching jobs at many
universities. Only men who agree with them are appointed as
teachers and instructors of the social sciences, and only
textbooks supporting their ideas are used.
Ludwig von Mises
No matter how deeply you distrust the government's judgment,
you are too trusting.
George Will
One of the things the government can't do is run anything. The
only things our government runs are the post office and the
railroads, and both of them are bankrupt.
Lee Iacocca
We need only take our heads out of the sand to see clearly that
interventionism not only has failed to provide the promised
something-for-nothing, but has led to all sorts of undesirable
consequences. Indeed, many are just beginning to realize that
we are moving towards disaster even though we have been on a
wrong heading for decades.
Leonard E. Read
There are millions receiving government payments who have come
to consider them as an earned right, who of course find them
inadequate, and who are outraged at the slightest suggestion of
a critical re-examination of the subject. The political
pressure for constant extension and increase of these benefits
is almost irresistible.
Henry Hazlitt
The policy of letting the free market determine the height of
wage rates is the only reasonable and successful full-
employment policy.
Ludwig von Mises
The left's obsession with the high incomes of corporate
executives never seems to extend to equally high - or higher -
incomes of professional athletes, entertainers, or best-selling
authors like Danielle Steel.
Thomas Sowell
Those who would administer (charity) wisely must, indeed, be
wise, for one of the serious obstacles to the improvement of
our race is indiscriminate charity. It were better for mankind
that the millions of the rich were thrown into the sea than
spent to encourage the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy. Of
every thousand dollars spent in so-called charity today, it is
probable that nine hundred and fifty dollars is unwisely spent
- so spent, indeed, as to produce the very evils which it hopes
to mitigate or cure.
Andrew Carnegie
Free market economists must be given the same opportunity in
our faculties which only the advocates of socialism and
intervention enjoy today. This is surely not too much to ask
as long as this country has not yet gone totalitarian.
Ludwig von Mises
I am not robbed by people who have more money than me. I am
robbed by a government that wants to penalize my industry and
give increasing portions of what I earn to people who do not
emulate my principles, morals and ethics.
Cal Thomas
The natural effort of every individual to better his own
condition is so powerful that it is alone, and without any
assistance, capable not only of carrying on the society to
wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting 100 impertinent
obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often
encumbers its operations.
Adam Smith
I would like to suggest to you that the extent to which
government in America has departed from the original design of
inhibiting the destructive actions of man and invoking a common
justice; the extent to which the government has invaded the
productive and creative areas; the extent to which the
government in this country has assumed the responsibility for
the security, welfare, and prosperity of our people is a
measure of the extent to which socialism has developed here in
this land of ours.
Leonard E. Read
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly
is to fill the world with fools.
Herbert Spencer
The long-term cost of a welfare society is the infantilization
of the population.
Mark Steyn
The truth is that capitalism has not only multiplied population
figures, but at the same time, improved the people's standard
of living in an unprecedented way. Neither economic thinking
nor historical experience suggest that any other social system
could be as beneficial to the masses as capitalism. The
results speak for themselves. The market economy needs no
apologists and propagandists. It can apply to itself the words
of Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph in St. Pauls: "Si monumentum
requiris, circumspice." (If you seek his monument, look
around.)
Ludwig von Mises
Doing well is the result of doing good. That is what
capitalism is about.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Most politicians are ever eager to regulate industrial and
commercial activity and strike at the economic elite with
confiscatory taxation. Unfortunately, regulation and taxation
tend to hamper economic activity, inhibit productivity, and
depress levels of living.
Hans F. Sennholz
Welfare reform has not been successful in significantly
reducing levels of out-of-wedlock births, nor has it enabled
people to become truly self-sufficient.
Michael D. Tanner
To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon,
directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated,
preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded,
by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor
the virtue to do so.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
The effect of capitalism is to steer human selfishness so that,
through the invisible hand of competition, the energies of the
capitalist produce the abundance from which the whole society
benefits.
Dinesh D'Souza
Outside of one or two economics professors, nearly the entire
liberal arts faculty of the typical university is reliably
anticapitalist. As a class, liberal arts academics can be
depended on to oppose economic development, support high taxes,
and latch on to every anti-enterprise cause that comes along.
Llewellyn H. Rochwell, Jr.
Politicians and bureaucrats are substituting their uninformed,
largely political decisions for those of the marketplace.
Their miscalculations demonstrate that they do not and cannot
possess the information, knowledge, means, and discipline to
manage the economy.
Mark R. Levin
You can't increase prosperity by taxing success.
Calvin Coolidge
The growing role that government has played in financing and
administering schooling has led not only to enormous waste of
taxpayer's money but also to a far poorer school system.
Milton & Rose Friedman
Liberal hostility to the traditional family helped to undermine
centuries of accumulated wisdom and experience about what was
best for children and adults. Far from benefitting only men,
marriage confers enormous advantages on women and children as
well - a fact that has been thrown into sharp relief by its
breakdown over the past forty years.
Mona Charen
Apparently the only people that are supposed to be responsible
are the taxpayers - and they are increasingly made responsible
for other people's irresponsibility.
Thomas Sowell
Suggestion of the Communist Manifesto was "abolition of all
right of inheritance". Looking backward upon the past history
of estate taxes, we have to realize that they more and more
approached the goal set by Marx. Estate taxes of the height
they have already attained for the upper brackets are no longer
to be qualified as taxes. They are measures of expropriation.
Ludwig von Mises
The fact is that the New Deal did not work. It prolonged what
might have been a troubling two-year downturn into a horrifying
blow to world prosperity that ended in a war that killed
countless millions. It was one of the greatest acts of
wreckage in world history.
Llewellyn H, Rockwell, Jr.
Government sponsors untold waste, criminality and inequity in
every sphere of life it touches, giving little or nothing
in return.
Doug Casey
He [the Statist] is unmoved by reason, evidence, and history.
Mark R. Levin
It is one of the advantages of competitive private enterprise
that the penalties for failure are levied against those who
fail - the damage is not assessed against the whole society.
Paul L. Poirot
It's not as if socialism is a new idea. It was tried in the
20th century. It produced economic stagnation and despair. In
its purest form, it extinguished more than one hundred
million people.
Llewellyn H, Rockwell, Jr.
American bureaucrats are no better than those of any other
nationality when it comes to making socialism work. It can't
be done.
Paul L. Poirot
No state empowered to do what is supposedly necessary will
restrain itself to those things. It will expand as much as
public opinion will tolerate.
Llewellyn H, Rockwell, Jr.
As a very important source of strength and security, cherish
public credit. One method of preserving it is to use it as
sparingly as possible.
George Washington
What ... can the government do to help the poor? The only
answer is the libertarian answer: Get out of the way.
Murray N. Rothbard
Liberals see the Constitution as "living" and "evolving" - that
is, gradually turning into something that would have been
unrecognizable to its authors.
Joseph Sobran
Envy is always referred to by its political alias: "social
justice".
Thomas Sowell
Each trillion dollars devoted to failure is a trillion that is
not available for success.
Martin Hutchinson
The idea that even the brightest person or group of bright
people, much less the U.S. Congress, can wisely manage an
economy has to be the height of arrogance and conceit.
Walter Williams
What does "economic justice" mean, except that you want
something that someone else produced, without having to produce
anything yourself in return?
Thomas Sowell
Eventually economic growth reaches the point at which the
accumulation of wealth in the families of achievers becomes so
significant that the hatred and envy of success becomes
stronger than the desire for continued economic growth, and a
period dominated by resentment begins.
Robert Sheaffer
There exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for
equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the
powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality
in slavery to inequality with freedom.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The greed and envy of the nonproducer is insatiable, so that
eventually nothing short of 100% taxation will please him.
Robert Ringer
Rule by the statist elite is not benign or simply a matter of
who happens to be in office; it is rule by a growing army of
leeches and parasites battening off the income and wealth of
hard-working Americans, destroying their property, corrupting
their customs and institutions, sneering at their religion.
Murray M. Rothbard
If the U.S. government had had its current philosophy and power
a hundred years ago, it would have tried to keep the carriage
and buggy whip industries on life support.
Doug Casey
Rapid increases in the quantity of money produce inflation.
Sharp decreases produce depression.
Milton Friedman
It is all too easy for the liberal media to stir up the
irrational hatreds of millions of people who see themselves as
less fortunate than others, by repeatedly talking about the
billions of dollars in "windfall profits" earned by major
corporations, by featuring periodic stories on the opulent
living of wealthy individuals, or by pointing an accusing
finger at "loopholes" used by "the rich".
Robert Ringer
It is no longer a question of whether there is a tendency or a
tilt to the left; the faculties of American universities and
colleges are overwhelmingly leftist.
Martin Anderson
Centers of unionism are also centers of unemployment.
Hans F. Sennholz
The marketplace is a wondrous institution. It harnesses the
self-interest of each of us and puts it to work for the benefit
of all. And it does so without intruding upon our desires, our
privacy, or our freedom. In deed it is regulation by reality,
not by coercion.
Harry Browne
Once empowered, socialism refused to yield its promised
rewards. The more dogged the effort to achieve it, the more
the outcome mocked the humane ideals it proclaimed.
Joshua Muravchik
It isn't possible to give the government just a little control
over the economy and our lives. Once we cede that power to
government, it uses the power to take more from us. That's
why every year the government controls more of our lives.
Harry Browne
The intellectual finds it reassuring to say that the
businessman gets his money by luck; or monopoly, or
exploitation, or dishonesty, or what have you. As a matter of
fact, the truly dishonest man will last longer in college
teaching or the ministry than he will in the business world.
Benjamin A. Rogge
One thing is certain. At some point global investors will lose
confidence in our [U.S.] easy dollars and debt-financed
prosperity, and then the chickens will come home to roost.
David A. Stockman
The system of plunder derives much of its support from
individuals who do not subscribe to socialism but who say,
"We're paying for it, so we might as well get our share."
Leornard E. Read
Failure is a big part of a free market's success. People fail
to live up to their potential, or to carry out all their good
intentions, in all kinds of economic and political systems.
Capitalism makes them pay a price for their failures, while
socialism, feudalism, fascism and other systems enable
personal failures, especially by those at the top, to be
ignored.
Thomas Sowell
The enemy and his allies are now at the gates of the
capitalists' fortress. Is there any hope that the businessman
will finally sense the danger to himself and the system of
which he is a part and rise to meet the challenge?
Benjamin A. Rogge
The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be
reduced: the arrogance of the authorities must be moderated
and controlled. Payments to foreign governments must be
reduced, if Rome doesn't want to become bankrupt. People must
again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Capitalism has been one of the most dynamic forces in human
history, transforming one society after another, and today it
has become established as an international system determining
the economic fate of most of mankind.
Peter L. Berger
Governments, attempting to please a small percentage of their
citizens by protecting them from foreign competition, push
their populations toward poverty. A country that protects
farmers does so at the expense of all who eat. A country that
protects auto workers does so at the expense of all who drive.
Free trade, on the other hand, enlarges markets and creates
prosperity everywhere it is tried.
Thomas G. Donlan
They may often be wrong, these fearless liberal reporters, but
they are never in doubt. Once they ran doomsday stories about
cataclysmic catastrophes that would surely be brought on by
global cooling. Now they run stories about cataclysmic
catastrophes that will just as surely be brought on by global
warming.
Bernard Goldberg
Democratic government has this fundamental problem: 20 percent
of the people do most of the productive work and create most of
the nation's wealth, but the other 80 percent command a heavy
majority of votes.
Thomas G. Donlan
The stark truth is that as long as the welfare state makes it
possible for young women - or teenage girls - to have children
without a husband and survive without a job, out-of-wedlock
births will remain high, and the inner city will continue to be
marked by crime, poverty, and despair.
David Boaz
Socialized medicine must fail for the same reason all socialism
must fail: it offers no system for rationally allocating
resources, and instead promotes the overutilization of all
resources, ending in bankruptcy.
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
You can travel from one end of the industrialized world to the
other and almost the only people you will find engaging in
backbreaking toil are people who are doing it for sport. To
find people whose day's toil has not been lightened by
mechanical invention, you must go to the non-capitalist world.
Milton Friedman
The American businessmen, as a class, have demonstrated the
greatest productive genius and the most spectacular
achievements ever recorded in the economic history of mankind.
What reward did they receive from our culture and its
intellectuals? The position of a hated, persecuted minority.
The position of a scapegoat for the evils of the bureaucrats.
Ayn Rand
The cheap but simple human emotion of envy is the driving force
of all socialism, of all anti-capitalist philosophy. It is the
mark of the intellectual.
Andrew J. Galambos
A society that puts equality - in the sense of equality of
outcome - ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality
nor freedom.
Milton Friedman
A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has
destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome's
decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her
failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes,
her consuming wars.
Will Durant
Modern liberalism undermines the family, the institution best
able to rear children and care for the elderly. Its welfare
programs preempt charitable activities and community altruism
through government welfare programs.
Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr.
Whether ancient or modern, monarchy or republic, coin or
paper, each nation descends pretty much the same slippery
slope, expanding government to address perceived needs,
accumulating too much debt, and then repudiating its
obligations by destroying its currency.
James Turk and John Rubino
Isn't the whole idea behind the massive regulation and
regimentation of American industry and society the notion that
individuals should be forced to behave in ways defined by a small
government elite?
Thomas J. DiLorenzo
Spurred on by the demagogues who are trying to control us by
pretending to take care of us, we're rejecting the original
American idea of rewarding each person according to his merit.
Dean Russell
Unfortunately, it is not in the power of government to make
everyone more prosperous. Government can only raise the income
of one person by taking from another.
Hans F. Sennholz
It is true that the top quintile is getting richer while the
bottom is getting poorer, but the bottom is not the same
people. There is, fortunately, a constant churning at the bottom
as new immigrants move in and those who used to be at the
bottom begin their long, thrilling upward climb to the American
dream.
Dick Morris
Social justice rests on the hate towards those that enjoy a
comfortable position, namely, upon envy.
Friedrich Hayek
Every man has a right to his prejudice, which is his opinion.
He does not have a right to enact his prejudice into law.
Robert W. Blake
Inflation comes about because our politicians and bankers
create billions of new dollars out of nowhere. It is, in
essence, the same thing as counterfeiting, which if done by a
private citizen would result in a jail sentence.
Nelson Hultberg
It should be remembered that men of courage, integrity, and
principle can stand up to Big Brother and resist the headlong
march into economic tyranny.
Richard M. Eyeballing
We were poor when I was young, but the difference then was that
the government didn't come around telling you that you were poor.
Ronald Reagan
Socialism constitutes a threat to the present and future
welfare of the human race, in the sense that neither socialism
nor any other known substitute for the market order could
sustain the current population of the world.
Friedrich Hacek
The way to get a maximum rate of "economic growth" - assuming
this to be our aim - is to give maximum encouragement to
production, employment, saving, and investment. And the way to
do this is to maintain a free market and a sound currency.
Henry Hazlitt
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer.
Ludwig von Mises
Perhaps the most important reason to be skeptical of government
inflation numbers is that the government, like a fox
campaigning to guard a hen house, has many reasons to be
disingenuous. As the world's largest debtor, the Federal
Government is inflation's primary beneficiary.
Butler Shafer
Big government is antithetical to freedom. Every new government
program reduces our freedom just a little bit more.
Michael D. Tanner
There is no place in civilization for the idler. None of us
has any right to ease.
Henry Ford
To continue on the road we Americans have traveled for the past
century is ultimately to deliver ourselves completely into the
hands of an unlimited government. We can have a free society
or a welfare state. We cannot have both.
Robert Highs
A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on
the support of Paul.
George Bernard Shaw
Bureaucrats and their institutions have no need of competence.
Being insulated from any and all forms of economic reality,
they are not subject to the need to cooperate with those around
them, nor is there any requirement that they earn or create the
resources which they so casually use up. The wielders of
government do not need to show a profit, they merely need to
write a law or a regulation.
Bill Buckler
Capitalism in the 19th century did not doom the worker to a
life of perpetual poverty. Instead, they kept creating new and
better-paying employments as the decades went by. They
produced the wealth and rising income that resulted in the
emergence of a phenomenon completely new to human history: a
self-supporting and educated middle class that grew more and
more as the lower classes bettered their economic well-being.
Richard M. Eyeballing
The state provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for
predation on the property of the producers.
Murray M. Rothbard
One of the consequences of such notions as "entitlements" is
that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that
society owes them something, apparently just for being nice
enough to grace us with their presence.
Thomas Sowell
Counting obligations under Medicare and Social Security, the
real debt of the United States is more than 10 times the
reported national debt.
Addison Wiggin
The welfare culture tells the man he is not a necessary part
of the family; he feels dispensable, his wife knows he is
dispensable, his children sense it.
George Guilder
The American people have embraced a way of life based on the
notion that there's nothing morally wrong with taking money
from one person in order to give it to another person.
Jacob G. Hornberger
Democracy must be something more than two wolves and one sheep
voting on what to do for dinner.
James Bovard
.. social engineering has been the salient delusion and the
greatest curse of the modern age .. In the twentieth century it
has killed scores of millions of innocent people in Soviet
Russia, Nazi Germany, Communist China ...
Paul Johnson
The economic freedom that made the U.S. economy the leader of
the world has given way to a rigged, controlled, and regulated
economy.
Bill Bonner
He who serves the public best, makes the highest profits.
Ludwig von Mises
The consumers are merciless. They never buy in order to
benefit a less efficient producer and to protect him against
the consequences of his failure to manage better. They want to
be served as well as possible. And the working of the
capitalist system forces the entrepreneur to obey the orders
issued by the customers.
Ludwig von Mises
Someone once said that a fool can put on his coat better than a
wise man can put it on for him. The implications of that
undermine most of the agenda of the political left.
Thomas Sowell
We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor
instead. We tried to remove the barriers to escape poverty and
inadvertently built a trap.
Charles Murray
[Cultural relativism] licenses the envy of the untalented,
giving rise to what has been called the revenge of failure:
Those who cannot paint destroy the canons of painting; those
who cannot write reject canonical literature.
George Will
Foreign aid breeds kleptocracies, or governments of thieves.
James Bovard
The man who builds a factory, builds a temple.
Calvin Coolidge
If liberals had been in charge of the Arizona memorial, it
would probably have featured an exhaustive exhibit about the
internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and little
about the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Mona Charen
I believe the money I make belongs to me and my family, not
some government stooge with a bad comb-over who wants to give
it to crack addicts for squirting out babies.
Andy Rooney
The welfare state has always been judged by its good
intentions, rather than its bad results.
Thomas Sowell
The capitalist has this over the politician and the clergyman;
he has in practice done more to raise the standard of living of
the poor than all the government and church programs in history
... Monsanto and the Archer Daniels Midland Company have fed
more hungry people than all the ... soup kitchens combined.
Dinesh D'Souza
Ideological bigotry has become the norm on even our most
prestigious campuses, where students can go for years without
reading or hearing anything that challenges the left vision.
Thomas Sowell
The child welfare system - devised and run by liberal social
workers, psychologists, and judges ... treats incompetent or
abusive parents as its clients, and only secondarily considers
the needs of the children involved.
Mona Charen
Every socialist is a disguised dictator.
Ludwig von Mises
The unprecedented success of Keynesianism is due to the fact
that it provides an apparent justification for the "deficit
spending" policies of contemporary governments. It is the
pseudo-philosophy of those who think of nothing else than to
dissipate the capital accumulated by previous generations.
Ludwig von Mises
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the
urge to rule it.
H. L. Mencken
Police departments must use race and sex preferences in hiring
as a result of federal court decrees and political pressures.
To meet these demands, many police departments have lowered,
and in some cases eliminated, established standards for
personal character and intellectual and physical capacity ...
Washington, D.C. had to indict or fire 350 cops; New Orleans
indicted more than 100. In these cities, policemen have been
charged with crimes ranging from murder and rape to robbing drug
dealers and selling confiscated drugs.
Walter Williams
Contrary to the vision of the left, it was the free market
which produced affordable housing - before government
intervention made housing unaffordable.
Thomas Sowell
The legacy of the New Deal was, more than anything else, a
matter of ideological change. Henceforth, nearly everyone
would look to the federal government for solutions to problems
great and small, real and imagined, personal as well as social.
Robert Highs
What can prevent the coming of totalitarian socialism is only a
thorough change in ideologies. What we need is an open
positive endorsement of that system to which we owe all of the
wealth that distinguishes our age from the conditions of ages
gone by.
Ludwig von Mises
Liberals cling to the idea that critics of welfare are
motivated by greed or callous disregard for the less fortunate.
In fact, during the twenty five years that followed Lyndon
Johnson's declaration of war on poverty, U.S. taxpayers spent
$3 trillion providing every conceivable support for the poor,
the elderly, and the infirm. Private foundations spent scores
of billions more, and private and religious charities even more.
Nevertheless, as Ronald Reagan later quipped, "In the war on
poverty, poverty won".
Mona Charen
Most Marxist intellectuals were heirs to fortunes or had rich
fathers. For example, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Rosa
Luxumburg, Vladimir Lenin, Fidel Castro, and Herbert Marcusse.
Carl H. Middleton
Achievement is not what liberalism is about. Victimhood and
dependency are.
Thomas Sowell
Most intellectuals in the world are aware of what socialism
did to Russia. And yet many still cling to the socialist
ideal.
Robert A. Sirico
Our Founding Fathers set up a constitutional framework for
government that strictly limited government power. They set in
place barriers to the exercise of government power, devising an
intricate system of checks and balances, dividing power between
national and state governments as well as among three
independent branches of government. And, most important, they
established a government of enumerated powers, carefully
spelling out those few things that the federal government could
do and reserving those powers not specified to the states and
the people.
Michael D. Tanner
What was distinctly Western was not slavery but the moral
crusade to end slavery.
Dinesh D'Souza
Keynesian economics, and socialist central planning, have
trapped the Western economies into a slow death.
Wayne N. Krautkramer
When people who earn more than the average have their
"surplus", or the greater part of it, seized from them in
taxes, and when people who earn less than the average have the
deficiency, or the greater part of it, turned over to them in
hand-outs and doles, the production of all must sharply
decline; for the energetic and able lose their incentive to
produce more than the average, and the slothful and unskilled
lose their incentive to improve their condition.
Henry Hazlitt
Big government comes at a big cost. This cost most obviously
shows in reduced economic growth, fewer jobs, reduced take-home
pay, and less overall prosperity. In an era of globalization,
when Americans must compete on an international basis, taxation
and regulation act as an anchor on American productivity and
competitiveness.
Michael D. Tanner
Governments steal from their citizens through taxes and through
the subterfuge of monetizing their own IOUs.
John A. Pugsey
Liberal child welfare experts decided that child abuse was not
evidence of a moral or character flaw in the abusing parent.
Instead, like poverty, crime, and homelessness, child abuse came
to be viewed as evidence of a societal failure.
Mona Charen
Liberalism in various guises - feminism, the sexual revolution,
gay activism - has been at war with marriage and family for
several decades now. And when do-gooders look around at the
wreckage of human lives caused by disintegrating families, they
call for government to act as father, mother, brother, and
sister."
Mona Charen
It is fascinating to watch politicians come up with "solutions"
to problems that are the direct result of their previous
solutions. In many cases, the most efficient thing to do would
be to repeal their previous solution and stop being so gung-ho
for creating new solutions in the future. But, politically,
that is the last thing they will do.
Thomas Sowell
The fact is that the Great Depression, like most other periods
of severe unemployment, was produced by government
mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability in the
private economy.
Milton Friedman
Americans used to save their money. They used to be thrifty.
They used to make things to sell to foreigners. Foreigners used
to save their dollars so they could buy high-priced products,
Made in USA. So much did they crave U.S. dollars that the
American currency easily became the reserve currency of the
entire world, and America became the world's biggest creditor
by lending dollars to foreigners. Now, it is the foreigners who
lend. They save their dollars, not to buy U.S. goods, but to
buy U.S. Treasury bonds ... so Americans can buy high-quality
foreign-made goods! And now, America is the world's biggest
debtor."
Bill Bonner
I cannot lay my finger on that article of the Constitution
which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of
benevolence, the money of their constituents.
James Madison
The great blessing of private property, then, is that people
can benefit from their own industry and insulate themselves
from the negative effects of others' actions. It is like a set
of invisible mirrors that surround individuals, households or
firms, reflecting back on them the consequences of their acts.
The industrious will reap the benefits of their industry; the
frugal the consequences of their frugality; the improvident and
the profligate likewise. They receive their due, which is to
say they experience justice as a matter of routine.
Tom Bethell
Liberal dominance of important areas of America's social and
political life has undermined many of the virtues that have
sustained this country.
Mona Charen
Recipients of transfers set a bad example for others, including
their children, other relatives and friends, who see that one
can receive goods, services, or money from the government
without earning them. The onlookers easily adopt an attitude
that they, too, are entitled to such transfers. They have
fewer examples of hardworking, self-reliant people in their
families or neighborhoods.
Robert Highs
America became great because its citizens once subscribed to
the principle of individual responsibility. What will happen
now that this principle has been discarded remains to be seen.
Harold B. Jones Jr.
If sanity ever returns to our society and we stop taking
pretentious elites seriously, one of the signs will be that the
public will force the removal of those ugly pieces of twisted
metal that are called "art" in front of government buildings.
Thomas Sowell
Recipients of transfers tend to become less self-reliant and
more dependent on government payments. When people can get
support without exercising their own abilities to discover and
respond to opportunities for earning income, those abilities
atrophy. People forget - or never learn in the first place -
how to help themselves, and eventually some of them simply
accept their helplessness.
Robert Highs
Liberalism is really piecemeal socialism, and socialism always
attacks three basic social institutions: religion, the family,
and private property. Religion, because it offers a rival
authority to the state; the family, because it means a rival
loyalty to the state; and property, because it means material
independence of the state.
Joseph Sabran
Most of the great problems we face are caused by politicians
creating solutions to problems they created in the first place.
Walter Williams
The Ten Commandments contain 297 words. The Bill of Rights is
stated in 463 words. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address contains 266
words. A recent federal directive to regulate the price of
cabbage contains 26,911 words.
Atlanta Journal
These guys [liberals] will never tire of spending our money and
will never hold themselves accountable for their boondoggles.
For them the failure of $5 trillion to eradicate poverty simply
means we haven't spent enough money. Ditto with education.
The solution is always more money. No amount of empirical
evidence will shake their socialist theology.
David Limbaugh
Nothing could be more jolting and discordant with the vision of
today's intellectuals than the fact that it was businessmen,
devout religious leaders and Western imperialists who together
destroyed slavery around the world. And if it doesn't fit
their vision, it is the same to them that it never happened.
Thomas Sowell
Friedrich Hayek made the point that one of the keystones of
socialism is the denial of individual responsibility. Thus,
the crusade for socialism always included attacks on individual
responsibility. For if individuals do not have free will, and
are not responsible for their actions, then their lives must be
controlled somehow - preferably by the state - according to the
socialists. They must be regulated, regimented, and controlled
- for their own good.
Thomas J. DiLorenzo
Illegitimacy is the single most important social problem of our
time - more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy,
welfare, or homelessness because it drives everything else.
Charles Murray
Socialism crushes human rights, builds the state, impinges on
the liberty of conscience, and breeds social, cultural, and
economic degeneration.
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
In the United States, liberals have made it virtually
impossible [to increase the supply of oil] by banning drilling
in all sorts of places and preventing any new refinery from
being built anywhere in the country in the last 30 years.
Thomas Sowell
The [liberals] still believe that the "haves" of the country
won some mystical "lottery of life". They don't understand
that this country thrives on ingenuity, risk-taking,
entrepreneurship and the potential rewards from these labors;
not on "sacrificing for the common good". Until the Democrats
break from their Marxist mold, the sea of red on election day
maps will continue to grow.
Jeffrey J. Kros
The welfare system is the breeding ground of crime,
addiction and radical politics.
James Cook
When all government, in little as in great things, shall be
drawn to Washington as the Center of all power, it will render
powerless the checks provided of one government on another and
will become as venal and oppressive as the government from
which we separated.
Thomas Jefferson
Notwithstanding what some regard as the institutionalization of
compassion, the transfer society quashes genuine virtue.
Redistribution of income by means of government coercion is a
form of theft. Its supporters attempt to disguise its
essential nature by claiming that democratic procedures give it
legitimacy, but this justification is specious. Theft is
theft, whether it be carried out by one thief or by a hundred
million thieves acting in concert. And it is impossible to
found a good society on the institutionalization of theft.
Robert Higgs
It is truly hard to understand how liberal politicians,
activists and journalists so consistently escape accountability
for stoking the flames of racial disharmony while purporting to
dampen them and for dividing our society along racial, gender,
and economic lines while claiming to unite us.
David Limbaugh
Never was it [Capitalism] imposed on life as a system, or at
all. It grew out of life, not all at once but gradually, and
is therefore one of the great natural designs. When it was
found and identified by such men as Adam Smith, who wrote its
bible, and Karl Marx, who wrote its obituary too soon, it was
already working.
Garet Garrett
There are no dead-end jobs. There are only dead-end people.
Our current social philosophy, and the welfare state
apparatus based on it, are creating more dead-end people.
Thomas Sowell
The political left, which holds itself as progressive, rational
and fact-based, is becoming an enemy of academic inquiry, and a
practitioner of thought control on a wide variety of issues.
Increasingly, from the left's perspective, there is just one
acceptable viewpoint.
David Limbaugh
The welfare state is institutionalized crime - "organized
plunder", as the French economist Frederic Bastiat called it.
It systematizes and authorizes what is intrinsically wrong:
forcing some people to support others. The Democrats favor
the indefinite expansion of the welfare state, perpetually
increasing the ratio of force to freedom in society.
Joseph Sobran
The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to
restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people
to restrain the government - lest it come to dominate our lives
and interests.
Patrick Henry
Our nation is in deep trouble - morally, economically, and
politically. Practically everything in which the federal
government has embroiled itself for the last several decades is
in crisis - education, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid,
inflation and the dollar, welfare, government spending, the
drug war, and, of course, foreign policy.
Jacob G. Hornberger
Too many members of Congress believe they can solve all
economic problems, cure all social ills, and bring about
worldwide peace and prosperity simply by creating new federal
programs.
Ron Paul
Quotas have done nothing to help the black underclass, or break
the vicious cycles of welfare dependency and drug abuse, unwed
motherhood and crime, fatherless families and dysfunctional
public schools ... Uncle Sam spent trillions of dollars making
a bad situation worse. An avalanche of government welfare
money - no strings attached - paid people not to work or marry,
save or invest, or confront the behavioral causes of their
poverty.
Rod Martin
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.
Ronald Reagan
I am particularly struck by the neo-socialist concern for the
well-being of plants, animals, lakes and rivers, rain forests
and deserts - particularly when the concern for the environment
appears far more intense than the concern for the human family.
Robert A Sirico
Only the naive inflationists could believe that government
could enrich mankind through fiat money.
Ludwig von Mises
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the
blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal
sharing of misery.
Winston Churchill
Even as government dominates the headlines, private
entrepreneurs are busy every day working to improve products
and services that improve our lives. They do it without taxing
us or regulating us, or making us suffer through tedious
elections or political debates. They make their products and
offer them to us in a way that pleases the consuming public the
most. We can choose whether we want them or not.
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
Less than seventy-five years after it officially began, the
contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism
has won.
Robert Heilbroner
As the data from the past clarify, there is no evidence that
poverty causes crime but a great deal of evidence that crime
causes poverty. By aligning themselves against the police,
against commonsense tactics like stop and frisk, against metal
detectors in public housing, against swift and certain
punishment, and for a broad range of legal protections for
accused criminals, liberals helped to aggrieve the lives of
the poor and society as a whole.
Mona Charen
Unemployment doles can have no other effect than the
perpetuation of unemployment
Ludwig von Mises
Who can dispute that the governments of the United States
constitute the most voracious tax system in the history of
mankind? In the year 2000, those governments succeeded in
laying hands on more that $3 trillion - almost $11,000 each for
the 275 million men, women, and children resident in the
country. No other nation-state rakes in an amount even close
to the U.S. total.
Robert Higgs
The sad and tragic fact is that the civil rights movement,
despite its honorable and courageous past, has over the years
degenerated into a demagogic hustle, promoting the mindless
racism they once fought against.
Thomas Sowell
From the starch-heavy "food pyramid" to ethanol fuel, the
government adopts programs not because they are right but
because they gain votes, money or political power or solve
problems that politics has already created, such as silos full
of subsidized wheat or a shortage of gasoline due to the maze
of controls on refining.
Robert Prechter
Do we really want the people who created $40 trillion of
unfunded liabilities in Social Security and Medicare in charge of
our health care? Faceless bureaucrats, power-lusting
politicians, and people spending other people's money are a
recipe for disaster.
Edward H. Crane
While big-business leaders and firms can be highly productive
servants of consumers in a free-market economy, they are also,
all too often, seekers after subsidies, contracts, privileges,
or cartels furnished by big-government. Often, business
lobbyists and leaders are the spark plugs for the statist,
interventionist system.
Murray N. Rothbard
Today there are more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than there are
in Eastern Europe.
George Will
The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates.
Tacitus
Adam Smith's key insight was that both parties to an exchange
can benefit and that, so long as cooperation is strictly
voluntary, no exchange can take place unless both parties do
benefit.
Milton Friedman
The necessity for struggle is one of the clever devices through
which nature forces individuals to expand, develop, progress,
and become strong through resistance... We are forced to
recognize that this great universal necessity for struggle must
have a definite and useful purpose. That purpose is to force
the individual to sharpen his wits, arouse his enthusiasm,
build up his spirit of faith, gain definiteness of purpose,
develop his power of will, and inspire his faculty of
imagination to give him new uses for old ideas and concepts.
Napoleon Hill
Capitalism encourages entrepreneurs to act with consideration
for others even when their ultimate motive is to benefit
themselves.
Dinesh D’Souza
We may agree, for example, that our societies must provide
greater security for the individual; yet, if all we succeed in
producing is a social structure providing increased anonymity
and ever increasing boredom, then we should not wonder if
ingenious man turns to such amusements as drugs, housebreaking,
vandalism, mayhem, riots, or - at the most harmless - strange
haircuts, costumes, standards of cleanliness, and sexual
experiments.
Robert Ardrey
If you are idle you are on the road to ruin, and there few
stopping places upon it. It is rather a precipice than a road.
Henry Ward Beecher
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of
its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to
live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral
busybodies.
C. S. Lewis
Whether in the arts, entertainment, or academia, the dominant
players are talented people who believe that they are wiser and
better than the masses. They are appalled that capitalism
permits a B-school dropout to become a billionaire while they
scrape by for a measly raise when promoted from assistant to
associate professor. They set out to cripple the system that
brings this about.
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
Public opinion takes no offense at the endeavors of farmers,
workers, clerks, teachers, doctors, ministers, and people
from many callings to earn as much as they can. But it
censures the capitalists and entrepreneurs for their greed.
Ludwig von Mises
Immigrants used to come to America seeking freedom of speech,
freedom of religion and freedom from government. Now they
come looking for free health care, free education, and a free
lunch.
Harry Browne
The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards
it.
Harry Browne
Tariffs, quotas and other import restrictions protect the
business of the rich at the expense of high cost of living
for the poor. Their intent is to deprive you of the right to
choose, and to force you to buy the high-priced inferior
products of politically favored companies.
Alan Burns
It is easy to be conspicuously "compassionate" if others are
being forced to pay the cost.
Murray N. Rothbard
The market economy has created unfathomable prosperity and,
decade-by-decade, century-by-century, miraculous feats of
innovation, production, distribution, and social coordination.
To the free market, we owe all material prosperity, all leisure
time, our health and longevity, our huge and growing population
and nearly everything we call life itself.
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
When you subsidize poverty and failure you get more of both.
James Dale Davidson
If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara
Desert, in 5 years there would be a shortage of sand.
Milton Friedman
The only freedom that deserves the name, is that of pursuing
our own good in our way, so long as we do not attempt to
deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.
John Stuart Mill
Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our
motto.
Thomas Jefferson
"Need" now means wanting someone else's money. "Greed" means
wanting to keep your own. "Compassion" is when a politician
arranges the transfer.
Joseph Sobral
The power to tax is the power to destroy.
John Marshall
Today it is not big business that we have to fear. It is big
government.
Wendell Phillips
Both sides of the political spectrum must one day realize that
limitless government intrusion in the economy, in our personal
lives, and in the affairs of other nations cannot serve the best
interests of America.
Ron Paul
All the fiery rhetoric of the founders was directed at a
"tyrant" who taxed his subjects at a rate of about three
percent. Today, we in "the land of the free" are taxed at
about 50 percent when you add federal, state and local taxes.
What kind of government would do that?
Doug Newman
The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but
under the name of liberalism, they will adopt every fragment of
the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist
nation without ever knowing how it happened.
Norman Thomas
There is no difference between communism and socialism, except
in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism
proposes to enslave men by force, socialism -- by vote. It is
merely the difference between murder and suicide.
Ayn Rand
The truth is all men having power ought to be mistrusted.
James Madison
No nation was ever ruined by trade.
Benjamin Franklin
The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce
his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.
H.L. Mencken
Victimhood and a "can't do" spirit is what the Democratic Party
has mostly been about since the Great Depression.
Cal Thomas
Government control gives rise to fraud, suppression of Truth,
intensification of the black market and artificial scarcity.
Above all, it unmans the people and deprives them of initiative,
it undoes the teaching of self-help.
Gandhi
The Constitution was made to guard the people against the
dangers of good intentions.
Daniel Webster
Capitalism, and capitalism alone, has rescued the human race
from degrading poverty, rampant sickness and early death.
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
For liberals, supposedly good intentions always trump results.
David Limbaugh
The fact is that the New Deal was, overall, a dismal failure.
Mark R. Levin
The government that we gave limited power to - to protect our
rights - has grown into a hideous behemoth that continually
increases its power and now enslaves the people, and causes
strife throughout the world.
Tom Parker
There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently
occupied than in getting money.
Samuel Johnson
With capitalism and prosperity came something new: the idea of
progress. This is the notion that things are getting better and
will continue to get better in the future.
Dinesh D'Souza
Private enterprise creates; government destroys. That is the
great economic lesson of our times.
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
No one can find a safe way out for himself if society is
sweeping towards destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own
interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual
battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of
everyone hang on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every
man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive
battle into which our epoch has plunged us.
Ludwig von Mises
No nation can survive without passing its heritage, language
and, yes, faith to the next generation. A country must be
built on something substantial and if the cultist elitists
think it can be built on "diversity", that is a foundation of
sifting sand.
Cal Thomas
A businessman who can create useful, well-paid and secure jobs
in doubly blessed, by the individual he makes self-supporting
and by the society he renders more secure. He helps himself,
too, for, as Maimonides says, there is joy in lifting people
out of want, not by alms but on a permanent basis.
Paul Johnson
The free market promotes self-worth, self-sufficiency, shared
values, and honest dealings, which enhance the individual, the
family, and the community. It discriminates against no race,
religion, or gender.
Mark R. Levin
Taxing the rich to fund poorly managed government programs is
simply a self-destructive decision: It does nothing more than
move money and investment decisions away from proven money-
makers (read: job producers) to Washington amateurs. In both
cases, Americans lose.
T. J. Rodgers
That which is common to the greatest number has the least care
bestowed upon it.
Aristotle
What belongs to no one is wasted by every one. What belongs to
one man in particular is the object of his economy and care.
James Wilson
If individuals can take from a common pot regardless of how
much they put into it, each person has an incentive to be a
free loader, to do as little as possible and take as much as
possible because what one fails to take will be taken by
someone else.
John Stossel
If history could teach us anything, it would be that private
property is inextricably linked with civilization.
Ludwig von Mises
Our educational system, from the schools to the universities,
are actively undermining any sense of loyalty to the
traditions, institutions, and values of American society.
Thomas Sowell
To the masses the catchwords of Socialism sound enticing ... so
they will continue to work for Socialism, helping thereby to
bring about the inevitable decline of the civilization which
the nations of the West have taken thousands of years to build
up.
Ludwig von Mises
There are still plenty of people seeking to take our liberty, to
force us into collectivist schemes, to promise us security or
handouts in return for our freedom, or to impose their agendas
on the rest of us.
David Boaz
The progressive notion of the state as a loving, caring parent
is becoming a bipartisan affair.
Jonah Goldberg
New taxes are so unpopular that most "social" handout schemes
are originally enacted without enough increased taxation to pay
for them. The result is chronic government deficits, paid for
by the issuance of additional paper money.
Henry Hazlitt
The natural tendency of government, once in charge of money, is
to inflate and destroy the value of the currency.
Murray N. Rothbard
Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without
end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C. S. Lewis
In many cases rent control appears to be the most effective
technique presently known to destroy a city - except for
bombing.
Assar Lindbeck
The oil industry is hardly free to operate as efficiently as it
could or be as responsive to consumer demands as it would like.
It has become, in essence, a quasi-state-run enterprise,
because it cannot drill, transport, refine, and store fuel
without receiving government permission, complying with
government regulations, and paying taxes at every level of
production.
Mark R. Levin
Government, not the oil industry, is the biggest "profiteer"
from oil. And it uses the tax revenue to expand its own
authority at the expense of the individual, as it does with an
endless number of other industries - including electric power,
coal, lumber, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, aircraft, and
agriculture. The Statist's intrusion into the free market is
endless.
Mark R. Levin
The more complex our economy, the more we should rely on the
miraculous, self-adopting processes of men acting freely.
No mind of man nor any combination of minds can even envision,
let alone intelligently control, the countless human energy
exchanges in a simple society, to say nothing of a complex one.
Leonard E. Read
In the market economy the worker sells his services as other
people sell their commodities. The employer is not the
employee's lord. He is simply the buyer of services which he
must purchase at their market price.
Ludwig von Mises
What both the left and the right overlook is our Founders'
wisdom about the limits and dangers of government.
Edward H. Crane
The best way to help the poor is to slash taxes and allow
savings, investment, and creation of jobs to proceed
unhampered.
Murray N. Rothbard
So virtuous are the programs said to be - pensions for the
elderly, compensation for the unemployed, medicine for the
sick, and assistance for the disabled - few dare to ring the
alarm of looming economic catastrophe that threatens to
destabilize the civil society.
Mark R. Levin
Most of Marx's predictions have failed to materialize, and his
labor theory of value and other ideas have been proven wrong.
Marx failed to recognize the incentive system built into the
capitalistic model - consumer choice and the profit motive of
the entrepreneur. The irony is that it is capitalism, not
socialism or Marxism, that has liberated the worker from the
chains of poverty, monopoly, war and oppression, and has better
achieved Marx's vision of a millennium of hope, peace,
abundance, leisure, and aesthetic expression for the "full"
human being.
Mark Skousen
If you really want to help the poor, help the rich. They're
the ones who will invest, build more factories, create more
jobs.
William E. Simon
Governing a large country is like frying a small fish. You
spoil it by too much poking.
Lao Tzu
Nothing is more calculated to make a demagogue popular than a
constantly reiterated demand for heavy taxes on the rich.
Capital levies and high income taxes on the larger incomes are
extraordinarily popular with the masses, who do not have to pay
them.
Ludwig von Mises
So distant is America today from its founding principles that
it is difficult to precisely describe the nature of American
government. It is not strictly a constitutional republic,
because the Constitution has been and continues to be easily
altered by a judicial oligarchy that mostly enforces, if not
expands, the Statist's agenda. It is not strictly a
representative republic, because so many edicts are produced by
a maze of administrative departments that are unknown to the
public and detached from its sentiment. It is not strictly a
federal republic, because the states that gave the central
government life now live at its behest. What, then, is it? It
is a society steadily transitioning toward statism. If the
Conservative does not come to grips with the significance of
this transformation, he will be devoured by it.
Mark R. Levin
The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is
not as sacred as the laws of God, and there is not a force of
law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny
commence.
John Adams
Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is
the problem!
Ronald Reagan
"When our people were fed out of the common store, and laboured
jointly together, glad was he who could slip from his labour, or
slumber over his taske, he cared not how. Nay, the most honest
among them would hardly take so much true paines in a weeke,
as now for themselves they will doe in a day: neither cared
they for the increase, presuming that howsoever the harvest
prospered, the generall store must maintaine them, so that wee
reaped not so much Corne from the labours of thirtie, as now
three or foure doe provide for themselves."
Captain John Smith
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is
that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
Plato
This country may need a good five cent cigar; but it could
better use a hundred or so new millionaires - modern Edisons,
Carnegies, Hills, Fords, Wanamakers. We need men of vision
who'll build and produce - not little men who wish to divide
and equalize. In this age of the so-called "common man" we
desperately need a few uncommon men.
Dean Russell
The advocates of public control cannot do without inflation.
They need it in order to finance their policy of reckless
spending and lavish subsidizing and bribing the voters.
Ludwig von Mises
Such terms as communism, socialism, Fabianism, the welfare
state, Nazism, fascism, state intervention, egalitarianism, the
planned economy, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier
are simply different labels for much the same thing.
Leonard E. Read
Entitlement? How can you be entitled to someone else's money?
John Stossel
During recent years, men in free and willing exchange (the free
market) have discovered how to deliver the human voice around
the earth in one twenty-seventh of a second; how to deliver an
event, like a ball game, into everyone's living room, in color
and in motion, at the time it is going on; how to deliver
hundreds of people from Los Angeles to Baltimore in less than 3
hours and 19 minutes; how to deliver gas from a hole in Texas
to a range in New York at low cost and without subsidy; how to
deliver 64 ounces of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Eastern
Seaboard - more than halfway around the world - for less money
than the government will deliver a one-ounce letter across the
street in one's home town.
Leonard E. Read
What social arrangement could possibly be more humanitarian
than to let each individual rise to the full limit of his
creative potentialities? The competitive free market does this
and thus maximizes the opportunities for the more capable among
men to behave charitably toward their less fortunate brethren.
It is not a question of cooperation or competition.
Cooperation and competition in the market place afford the best
hope for each individual and for humanity in general.
Paul L. Poirot
Aa virtuous and industrious people may be cheaply governed.
Benjamin Franklin
What's most cruel about government intervention in the economy
is not how it stops us from helping the poor, but how it stops
the poor from helping themselves.
Barry Loberfeld
Social Security is a widely popular program because the
individual has been deceived by the Statist to believe that the
government has been prudently and diligently managing his
accumulated pension investment in his Social Security account,
which he presumes to be funded by his own payroll taxes.
Mark R. Levin
The socialistic concept of ideal humanity involves giving to
each person according to his needs, regardless of his efforts
to earn what he wants ... In other words, man is born for
comfort and ease, not work and struggle!
Paul L Poirot
The exercise of freedom invariably results in some choices
that are unwise or wrong. But, by living with the consequences
of his foolish choices a man learns to choose more wisely next
time.
Edmund A. Opitz
Almost all the fathers of socialism were members of the upper
middle class or of the professions.
Ludwig von Mises
Coercion is as much a tool of the welfare state as it is of
communism. The programs and edicts of both are backed up by
the police force. All of us know this to be true under
communism, but it is equally true under our own brand of
welfare statism.
Leonard E. Read
Laws and coercive union policies that increase wages at the
expense of profits do not create jobs; they destroy them.
Dean Russell
Both shortages and surpluses, whether Russian or Chinese or
American, are a consequence of substituting the decisions of
bureaucrats for the decisions of the market place.
Paul L. Poirot
Socialistic practices are now so ingrained in our thinking, so
customary, so much a part of our mores, that we take them for
granted.
Leonard E. Read
What generations created, the Left destroys. There are few
productive and noble institutions in America that the Left has
not hurt or attempted to hurt. But while the Left destroys a
great deal, it constructs almost nothing (outside of government
agencies, laws and lawsuits).
Dennis Prager
We have suffered more from this cause [paper money] than from
every other cause or calamity. It has killed more men, pervaded
and corrupted the choicest interests of our country more, and
done more injustice than even the arms and artifices of our
enemy.
Daniel Webster
When the coercive power of government is used to equalize
incomes, it guarantees less prosperity across the board and
spreads the misery, which is one of the many reasons Marxism
and socialism have failed everywhere they've been tried.
David Limbaugh
Never forget that no government has wealth of its own to spend.
The money has to come from taxation, monetary inflation, or debt
expansion that must be paid later. And government's spending
choices will always be uneconomic relative to how society would
use that wealth. That is to say, the money will be wasted.
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
Inflation is not a benign element in the economy's operation.
It is, as it has always been, the most dangerous and destructive
form of taxation.
Robert Higgs
Government interference with the economic process represents a
substitution of political for consumer objectives.
Sheldon Richman
When half of the people get the idea that they don't have to
work because the other half is going to take care of them, and
when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work
because someone else is going to get what they worked for, that
my dear friend, is about the end of any nation.
Ayn Rand
To compare a few people in government making decisions based on
limited information to millions of people making decisions
every second with their hard-earned money, there's just no
comparison there.
Paul Atkins
The planner is a potential dictator who wants to deprive all
other people of the power to plan and act according to their
own plans. He aims at one thing only: the exclusive absolute
preeminence of his own plan.
Ludwig von Mises
In the Western world, countries that were once the crucible of
freedom are slipping remorselessly into a thinly disguised
serfdom in which an ever higher proportion of your assets are
annexed by the state as superlandlord. Big government is where
nations go to die - not in Keynes' "long run", but sooner than
you think.
Mark Steyn
If it were possible to lift real economic growth by means of
money pumping, world poverty would have been eradicated a long
time ago. Real economic growth requires real savings to fund
various activities that support and promote it.
Aubie Baltin
The bureaucrat is not free to aim at improvement. He is bound
to obey rules and regulations established by a superior body.
He has no right to embark upon innovations if his superiors do
not approve them. His duty and his virtue is to be obedient.
Ludwig von Mises
My reading of history convinces me that most bad government
results from too much government.
Thomas Jefferson
Civilization is not an evolution of mankind but the
imposition of human good on human evil. It is not a historical
inevitability. It is a battle that has to be fought every day,
because evil doesn't recede willingly before the wheels of
progress.
Andrew McCarthy
We seem to be moving steadily in the direction of a society
where no one is responsible for what he himself did but we are
all responsible for what someone else did, either in the
present or in the past.
Thomas Sowell
Never in our history have we been headed at such breakneck
speed toward our own financial, political and cultural
destruction.
David Limbaugh
Whenever government assumed responsibility for the security,
welfare, and prosperity of citizens, the costs of government
rise beyond the point where it is politically expedient to
cover them by direct tax levies.
Leonard E. Read
The real bosses, in the capitalist system of market economy,
are the consumers. They, by their buying and by their
abstention from buying, decide who should own the capital and
run the plants. They determine what should be produced and in
what quantity and quality. Their attitudes result in either
profit or loss for the entrepreneur. They make poor men rich
and rich men poor. They are no easy bosses.
Ludwig von Mises
Instead of solving economic problems, government welfare
socialism created monstrous moral and spiritual problems - the
kind of problems that are inevitable when individuals turn
responsibility for their lives over to others.
Star Parker
People try to live within their income so they can afford to
pay taxes to a government that can't live within its income.
Robert Half
If the Liberal Left can create the common perception that
success and failure are simple matters of "fortune" and "luck",
then it is easy to promote and justify their various income
redistribution schemes.
Neal Boortz
Place economy among the first and most important virtues... We
must make our choice between economy and liberty, or profusion
and servitude... If we can prevent the government from wasting
the labors of the people under pretense of caring for them, we
will be wise.
Thomas Jefferson
Personal liberty without economic liberty is an absolute
contradiction; the one cannot exist without the other.
William E. Simon
Don't believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy
of individual rights, not group rights.
Clarence Thomas
Capitalism is about turning luxuries into necessities.
Andrew Carnegie
Daily experience proves to everybody except the most bigoted
fanatics of socialism that governmental management is
inefficient and wasteful.
Ludwig von Mises
The collection of any taxes which are not absolutely required,
which do not beyond reasonable doubt contribute to the public
welfare, is only a species of legalized larceny... The wise and
correct course to follow in taxation is not to destroy those
who have already secured success, but to create conditions
under which everyone will have a better chance to be
successful.
Calvin Coolidge
If an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not
take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most
economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple
insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie,
that one party can gain only at the expense of another.
Milton Friedman
The Constitution was definitely and specifically designed to
hobble all people who are so foolish to think themselves
capable of leading others by compulsion. It so functions
today, to an extent exasperating to the authoritarians - which
is why they want to get rid of it.
Leonard E. Read
There is no escape from the vast imbalances in international
trade and finance. They will be corrected, sooner or later, by
the inexorable principles that govern human action.
Hans F. Sennholz
You know that great prejudice exists against all successful
business enterprise - the more successful, the greater the
prejudice.
John D. Rockefeller
The less government interfered with private pursuits, the better
for general prosperity.
Martin Van Buren
Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get
through Congress today? It wouldn't even get out of committee.
F. Lee Bailey
When government assumes more and more responsibility for our
lives, less and less reason exists for us to be virtuous. We
are, in effect, protected from the consequences of nonvirtuous
behavior. The results are readily apparent. As government has
grown, our society has become less likely to work and save,
more intemperate and less concerned with the consequences of
our actions, less self-reliant, and even less compassionate
toward others.
Michael D. Tanner
Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-
meaning people who ignored the principle of individual
freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were
obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind-
in-the-mass through some pet formula of their own.
Henry Weaver
One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine
can do the work of an extraordinary man.
Elbert Hubbard
The more prosperity you have, the quicker you ... attract the
looters and the plunders ... And so when a country becomes
richer, it falls apart sooner.
Andrew J. Galambos
On the silver screen, capitalists are usually vilified as greedy
and heartless, while statists of every stripe are depicted as
selfless, romantic idealists who only want to help people.
Lawrence W. Reed
The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of
other peoples's money.
Margaret Thatcher
America's abundance was not created by public sacrifices to the
common good, but by the productive genius of free men who
pursued their own personal interests and the making of their
own private fortune.
Ayn Rand
The state tells lies in all the languages of good and evil;
and whatever it says it lies - and whatever it has it has
stolen.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
The rationale for the vast network of government welfare
programs as well as regulation and control over private
enterprise is based on the socialist analysis of the market
economy.
Richard M. Ebeling
Anything that shifts power from the individual judgment of free
citizens to government is a bad thing.
Mark Steyn
Being without work [in the United States] is still far better
for most people than being employed in Central America.
George J. Borjas
Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools.
They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught
them.
Ludwig von Mises
The transfer society is forever testing the bounds of patience
of taxpayers. Having reached the limit and still facing loud
demands for more benefits, it resorts to deficit financing.
Hans F. Sennholz
Civilization and profits go hand-in-hand.
Calvin Coolidge
Capitalism needs neither propaganda nor apostles. Its
achievements speak for themselves. Capitalism delivers the
goods.
Ludwig von Mises
Vast numbers of Americans today look to Washington for a rich
array of "entitlements" that speak of nothing so much as the
illusion of something for nothing.
Roger Pilon
Despite welfare reform, most of the mammoth federal and state
social welfare complex remains unchanged.
Michael D. Tanner
Liberals have been driven to the desperate expedient of
attributing ... social pathology in today's ghettos to "a
legacy of slavery" - even though black children grew up with
two parents more often under slavery than today.
Thomas Sowell
In this country, few people care to advocate, to defend, or
even to understand capitalism; yet fewer still wish to give up
its advantages.
Ayn Rand
Transfer payments discourage the recipients from earning
income in the present and from investing in their potential to
earn income in the future. People respond to a reduced cost of
idleness by choosing to be idle more often.
Robert Higgs
Economic growth can only be sustained by a surplus of
production over consumption. Price stability is an economic
chimera, impossible in theory and undesirable in practice. In
a growing economy, prices are not "stable", they are falling as
increased and improved production capacity leads to a higher
purchasing power for the monetary unit. The prerequisite is
not stable prices, it is stable MONEY!
Bill Buckler
The government pretends to be endowed with the mystical power
to accord favors out of an inexhaustible horn of plenty. It is
both omniscient and omnipotent. It can by a magic wand create
happiness and abundance. The truth is the government cannot
give if it does not take from somebody.
Ludwig von Mises
The dispute between the market order and socialism is no less
than a matter of survival. To follow socialist morality would
destroy much of present humankind and impoverish much of the
rest.
Friedrich Hayek
The allure of government programs in general for many people is
that these programs allow decisions to be made without having
to worry about the restraints of prices, which confront people
at every turn in a free market.
Thomas Sowell
Politicians never accuse you of "greed" for wanting other
people's money - only for wanting to keep your own money.
Joseph Sobran
Once upon a time, government budgets were balanced, our money
was sound, the streets were safe, and taxes imposed by all
levels of government took less than 10% of our income.
Harry Browne
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
The vision of the left, full of envy and resentment, takes its
worst toll on those at the bottom - whether black or white -
who find in that paranoid vision an excuse for
counterproductive and ultimately self-destructive attitudes and
behavior.
Thomas Sowell
The evidence is thus crystal-clear. Modern welfare destroys.
It does not build competence; it creates dependence ...
Peter Drucker
The statist never learns from his policy failures. He is never
deterred by the destruction he causes. Negative data are simply
rejected, as with his steadfast allegiance to failed Keynesian
economics.
David Limbaugh
People can come here, not work and not starve because the
welfare state guarantees that they can live off the rest of us.
Walter Williams
The key reason we are richer than our ancestors is that these
ancestors have bequeathed us buildings, factories and machines
that have given us a high living standard to start with.
Driven by irresponsible policy makers, America's present
generation is consuming the nation's capital.
Kurt Richebacher
A private-property, market system has much to recommend it. A
system is more moral if it holds individuals accountable for
their actions and encourages them to help others than if it
allows them to impose costs on others without their consent.
Peter Hill
Socialism's failure in the former Soviet Union and in the other
socialist countries stand as a clear and unquestionable warning
as to which path any rational and sane people should never
follow again. Government planning brought poverty and ruin ...
Unfortunately, America is not absorbing the lessons that should
be learned from the socialist experience and, instead, is
following the same path of destruction.
Richard M. Ebeling
Capitalism is based on individual rights - not on the sacrifice
of the individual to "the public good" of the collective.
Ayn Rand
Within the market society each serves all his fellow citizens
and each is served by them. It is a system of mutual exchange
of services and commodities, a mutual giving and receiving.
Ludwig von Mises
Salvation by society failed the most where it promised the
most, in Communist countries. But it also failed in the West.
Practically no government program enacted since the 1950's in the
Western world - or in the Communist countries - has been
successful.
Peter Drucker
Reference: James R. Cook. The Free Market and its Enemies. A Book of Quotes.
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