"Egalitarians create the most dangerous inequality of all -- inequality of power. Allowing politicians to determine what all other human beings will be allowed to earn is one of the most reckless gambles imaginable. Like the income tax, it may start off being applied only to the rich but it will inevitably reach us all."
- Thomas Sowell
"In matters of morality, the free market functions like an amplifier. By placing more wealth and resources at our disposal, it tends to boost and accentuate whatever character tendencies we already possess. The net result is usually favorable. Most people want a good life for themselves and for their families and friends, and such desires form a part of positive moral character."
- Tyler Cowen
"History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition."
- Milton Friedman
"Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered. Possibilities do not add up. They multiply.”
- Paul Romer
"The crisis that kills capitalism has been said to happen during every major recession and financial crisis ever since Karl Marx prophesized the collapse of capitalism in the middle of the 19th century."
- Gary Becker
Socialize the individual's surplus and you socialize his spirit and creativeness; you cannot paint the Mona Lisa by assigning one dab of paint to a thousand painters.
~William F. Buckley, Jr.
Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
~Albert Einstein
"A claim for equality of material position
can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers. "
"'Emergencies' have always been the pretext
on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded."
"We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice."
- Friedrich August von Hayek
"Each of us has a natural right, from God,
to defend his person, his liberty, and his property."
"Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
"When goods do not cross borders, soldiers will."
- Frederique Bastiat
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"Underlying most arguments against the free market
is a lack of belief in freedom itself."
"We have a system that increasingly t
axes work and subsidizes non-work."
"Fundamentally, there are only two ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion – the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation of individuals – the technique of the marketplace."
"Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program."
- Milton Friedman
"Free markets are simply millions upon millions of individual decision-makers, engaged in peaceable, voluntary exchange pursuing what they see in their best interests. People who denounce the free market and voluntary exchange, and are for control and coercion, believe they have more intelligence and superior wisdom to the masses. What's more, they believe they've been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. Of course, they have what they consider good reasons for doing so, but every tyrant that has ever existed has had what he believed were good reasons for restricting the liberty of others."
~George Mason Economist Walter Williams |
