Quotes about free-markets

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.

Liberty means refusing to allow some men to use the state to compel other men to serve their interests or opinion.

It's WW2 and there are wage controls in place. Instead of health care, companies decide to offer employees shoes. Having absorbed those costs, they later lobby for every company to be required to offer shoes. That calls forth regulation and monopolization of the shoe industry. Shoes are heavily subsidized. Every shoe must be approved. Producers must be domestic. They must adhere to a certain quality. They can't discriminate based on foot size or individual need. Prices rise, and some people lack

It is the consumers who make poor people rich and rich people poor.

As long as government has the power to regulate business, business will control government by funding the candidate that legislates in their favor. A free-market thwarts lobbying by taking the power that corporations seek away from government! The only sure way to prevent the rich from buying unfair government influence is to stop allowing government to use physical force against peaceful people. Whenever government is allowed to favor one group over another, the rich will always win, since they

It is precisely democracy which is destroying the American political structure, American law, and the American economy.

Whenever someone starts talking about 'fair competition' or indeed, about 'fairness' in general, it is time to keep a sharp eye on your wallet, for it is about to be picked.

What is peculiar and novel to our age is that the principal goal of politics in every advanced society is not, strictly speaking, a political one, that is today, it is not concerned with human beings as persons and citizens, but with human bodies. ... In all technologically advanced countries today, whatever political label they give themselves, their policies have, essentially, the same goal: to guarantee to every member of society, as a psychophysical organism, the right to physical and mental

The truth is, one who seeks to achieve freedom by petitioning those in power to give it to him has already failed, regardless of the response. To beg for the blessing of “authority” is to accept that the choice is the master’s alone to make, which means that the person is already, by definition, a slave.

The paralysis of potential is essential to the manufacturing of victims.

Recognizing that the boundaries of the market are ambiguous and cannot be determined in an objective way lets us realize that economics is not a science like physics or chemistry, but a political exercise... If the boundaries of what you are studying cannot be scientifically determined, what you are doing is not a science.

Think what it implies when you say that a country needs leaders. In your day-to-day life, you interact with all sorts of other individuals. And that's all society is: the collective name for lots of INDIVIDUALS. But for some inexplicable reason, we're taught to believe that one huge, arbitrarily chosen assortment of individuals (the "citizens" of one human livestock farm--I mean, "country") need some control freaks acting as intermediaries in order to interact with a different arbitrarily chosen

Before the mid-20th century, when American libertarians entangled themselves in conservative coalitions against the New Deal and Soviet Communism, "free market" thinkers largely saw themselves as liberals or radicals, not as conservatives. Libertarian writers, from Smith to Bastiat to Spencer, had little interest in tailoring their politics to conservative or "pro-business" measurements. They frequently identified capitalists, and their protectionist policies, as among the most dangerous enemies

When people encounter the free market and they recoil or react negatively to it, they're merely confessing that voluntaryism, trade and negotiation are foreign and threatening to them, which tells you everything about how tragically they were raised.

Entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid.

Hence the great irony: Hayek, one of the greatest champions of individual liberty and economic freedom the world has ever known, believed that knowledge was communal. Dewey, the champion of socialism and collectivism, believed that knowledge was individual. Hayek's is a philosophy that treats individuals as the best judges of their own self-interests, which in turn yield staggering communal cooperation. Dewey's was the philosophy of a giant, Monty Pythonesque crowd shouting on cue: "We're All In

It is easy to be conspicuously 'compassionate' if others are being forced to pay the cost.

There's a huge swath of humanity that has developed verbal abilities to extract resources from guilt-ridden people.They used to be priests, and now they're leftists.

There is no difference between the principles, policies and practical results of socialism—and those of any historical or prehistorical tyranny. Socialism is merely democratic absolute monarchy—that is, a system of absolutism without a fixed head, open to seizure of power by all corners, by any ruthless climber, opportunist, adventurer, demagogue or thug.

Collectivism is the "philosophy" of every cockroach and sewer rat: "If I want it, I must need it, and if I need it, I have a right to it, and if I have a right to it, it doesn't matter what I have to do to get it." Thefact that such an inherently animalistic, short-sighted, anti-humanviewpoint is now painted by some as compassionate and "progressive" does not make it any more sane, or any less dangerous.

Irony: Taking a 170-year-old envy-based "philosophy," which has led to the murder of several hundred million human beings and the oppression of billions more, and calling it "progressive".

If government played by the same rules as the rest of us, it would cease to be government.

("A Free Market in Education: The Answer to Prayer, And Other Issues")No matter where you are on the issue, there is no solution to it within a government school context, only perpetual conflict. The answer involves choice, competition and private alternatives. If you don't like what a business offers, you don't argue endlessly about it; you walk across the street. Why is this principle so complicated for some people?

Throw an idea into the world and its impact will ripple and reverberate beyond your side of the shore.

Socialism, or communism as it is sometimes called, is merely a secular religion, where the State becomes a god.

Every step which leads from capitalism toward planning is necessarily a step nearer to absolutism and dictatorship.

When the state itself is held to the same moral standards as everyone else, it dies. And that's a wonderful thing.

It is be­cause freedom means the renun­ciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.

To be sure, I am not speaking about Christian equality, whose real name is equity; but about this democratic and social equality, which is nothing but the canonization of envy and the chimera of jealous ineptitude. This equality was never anything but a mask which could not become reality without the abolition of all merit and virtue.

Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded.

Ultimately, we need to take control over the money supply out of the hands of our governments and make the production of money again subject to the principle of free association. The first step to endorsing and promoting this strategy is to realize that governments do not—indeed cannot—fulfill any positive role whatever through the control of our money.

A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas.

Have you ever noticed how statists are constantly “reforming” their own handiwork? Education reform. Health-care reform. Welfare reform. Tax reform. The very fact they’re always busy “reforming” is an implicit admission that they didn’t get it right the first 50 times.

People who can't imagine order without imposition always end up favoring power over liberty.

A "centrally planned economy" by definition discourages and despises participation by the masses. It's a bureaucratic oligarchy.

The profit of the one is the profit of the other.

they'll reregulate within ten years. There'll be a string of crashes, and they'll do it. the free marketeers will scream, but the fact is, free markets don't provide safety. Only regulation does that. You want safe food, you better have inspectors. You want safe water, you better have an EPA. You want a safe stock market, you better have an SEC. And you want safe airlines, you better regulate them too. Believe me, they will.

Arguing that the only problem with a free market is lack of competition, is like arguing that that the only problem with prostitution is that there aren't enough pimps.

Capitalist production...was necessary to develop the productive forces of society to a level which will make possible an equal development worthy of human beings for all members of society. All earlier forms of society were too poor for this.

Capitalism is not a form of government. Capitalism is but one thing only: Buy Low - Sell High. Capitalism is what happens when a government allows free association and respects property rights. It is a symptom of liberty.

We don’t live in a free market society… markets are controlled by the major players who influence legislation to perpetuate their control...

A time of ongoing cultural revolution when the adversaries of Christianity have made plain their intent to use the state machinery to promote radical social ideologies hardly seems an opportune moment to discuss how the rights of property might be compromised. Private property is an important bulwark against the ongoing anti-Christian campaign. Although opponents of the free market will doubtless claim that they wish to interfere with the rights of property only to this or that extent, or only t

Antiliberals endlessly berate their enemies for "instrumental thinking." But they do not clearly explain the evil of producing better goods at a lower cost.

These people live in many lands, speak different languages, practice different religions, may even hate one another- yet none of these differences prevented them from cooperating to produce a pencil. How did it happen? Adam Smith gave us the answer two hundred years ago.

Free markets and capitalism are predicated upon the definition of greed as altruistic in economics".~R. Alan Woods [2012]

They would tell you that governments could not manage things as economically as private individuals; they would repeat and repeat that, and think they were saying something! They could not see that “economical” management by masters meant simply that they, the people, were worked harder and ground closer and paid less!They were wage-earners and servants, at the mercy of exploiters whose one thought was to get as much out of them as possible; and they were taking an interest in the process, were