These quotes encompass all schools of economic thought from right to left, classical to modern, supply side to demand side, socialist to capitalist and so on. Add others in the discussion that you like and I will edit the article to include them regardless of the persuasion.
Please note transcribing these is enough fun for me so I am not going to fact check them. If you see something you think is mis-attributed just let me know otherwise I'm taking them directly as provided to me. Most I am typing up from a quote app I've earmarked over time. It doesn't include all authors equally so just post below things you like and, again, I'll add them.
In alphabetical order by author's last name:
- “An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.”
~ Paul Abbey - Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.
~ Frederic Bastiat - Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
~ Frederic Bastiat - Often the masses are plundered and do not know it.
~ Frederic Bastiat - They will come to learn in the end, at their own expense, that it is better to endure competition for rich customers than to be invested with monopoly over impoverished customers.
~ Frederic Bastiat - Fines are preferable to imprisonment and other types of punishment because they are more efficient. With a fine, the punishment to offenders is also revenue to the State.
~ Gary Becker - Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens.
~ William Beveridge - Scratch a pessimist and you will often find a defender of privilege.
~ William Beveridge - The first of all commodities to be exchanged is labour, and the freedom of man consists only in the exercise of the right to determine for himself in what manner his labour shall be employed, and how he will dispose of its products.
~ Henry Charles Carey - I believe socialism is the grandest theory ever presented and I am sure it will someday rule the world.
~ Andrew Carnegie - Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.
~ Winston Churchilll - I 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 - Economic advance is not the same thing as human progress.
~ John Clapham - The first issue to be settled is whether socialism has a right to exist. Are its allegations concerning the present system true? Is industry proceeding on a principle of fraud? I wish to test the power of recent economic theory to give an exact answer to this question.
~ John Bates Clark - Is it not obvious that if we are to have socialism - real and permanent socialism - all the fundamental opposition must be liquidated (i.e. rendered politically inactive by disfranchisement, and if necessary imprisonment)?
~ Gilbert Cope - Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Well socialism is exactly the reverse.
~ Len Deighton - Any union that can't accept workers choosing their own representatives through universal franchise is finished.
~ Jacques Delors - The problem of how we finance the welfare state should not obscure a separate issue: if each person thinks he has an inalianble right to welfare, no matter what happens to the world, that's not equity, it's just creating a society where you can't ask anything of people.
~ Jacques Delors - I have people like Apple’s Steve Jobs in mind when I think about designing tax policy for the top 1%. But Piketty seems to think that those at the top end did not earn their compensation, rather their high pay came from amorphous forces such as “gains from globalisation.” However, let’s say Piketty is right, that the innovators behind firms like Apple just happened to be lucky that their products became global bestsellers. It still makes no sense to impose high taxes on them because those entrepreneurs are more likely to use the cash productively than the government. Indeed, from the beginning of Silicon Valley, wave after wave of millionaires have funded the next wave of business successes through angel financing and venture capital. Obviously, that would not have been possible under Piketty’s 80% tax rate.
~ Chris Edwards - "The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules."
~ Albert Einstein - "I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils [of capitalism], namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society."
~ Albert Einstein
- Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.
~ Milton Friedman - A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
~ Milton Friedman - One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than by their results.
~ Milton Friedman - Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
~ Milton Friedman. - Governments never learn. Only people learn.
~ Milton Friedman. - Most economic fallacies derive from a tendency to assume there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.
~ Milton Friedman. - The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm, capitalism is that kind of a system.
~ Milton Friedman. - Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith - If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith
- In economics, the majority is always wrong.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith - Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith - More die in the United State from too much food than from too little.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith - The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith - You will find the State is the kind of organization which, thought it does big things badly, does small things badly too.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith - Man is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the only animal that is never satisfied.
~ Henry George - Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor, the world over.
~ Henry George - That which is unjust can really profit no one; that which is just can really harm no one.
~ Henry George - The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.
~ Henry George - The methods by which a trade union can alone act, are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.
~ Henry George - Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country.
~ Alan Greenspan - Look I'm very much in favor of tax cuts, but not with borrowed money. And the problem that we've gotten into in recent years is spending programs with borrowed money, tax cuts with borrowed money, and at the end of the day that proves disastrous.
~ Alan Greenspan - Whatever you tax you get less of.
~ Alan Greenspan - Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.
~ Alan Greenspan - A claim for equality of material possession can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.
~ Friedrich von Hayek - "Emergencies" have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.
~ Friedrich von Hayek - Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality.
~ Friedrich von Hayek - Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom.
~ Friedrich von Hayek - Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement. It is by no means an obvious remedy for the obvious evil which the interests of that class will necessarily demand. It is a construction of theorists.
~ Friedrich von Hayek - Socialist thought owes its appeal to the young largely to its visionary character; the very courage to indulge in Utopian thought is in this respect a source of strength for socialism which traditional liberalism sadly lacks. Speculation about general principles provides an opportunity for the play of the imagination of those who are unencumbered by much knowledge of the facts of present-day life. Their ideas suffer from inherent contradictions, and any attempt to put them into practice must produce something utterly different from what they expect.
~ Friedrich von Hayek, Intellectuals & Socialism - It is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the intellectual that he judges new ideas not by their specific merits but by the readiness with which they fit into his general conceptions, into the picture of the world which he regards as modern or advanced.
~ Friedrich von Hayek, Intellectuals & Socialism - The 'private sector' of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and the 'public sector' is, in fact, the coercive sector.
~ Henry Hazlitt - When the government makes loans or subsidies to business, what it does is to tax successful private business in order to support unsuccessful private business.
~ Henry Hazlitt - Everything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for. The world is full of so- called economists who in turn are full of schemes for getting something for nothing. They tell us that the government can spend and spend without taxing at all; that it can continue to pile up debt without ever paying it off, because "we owe it to ourselves.”
~ Henry Hazlitt - There is no more certain way to deter employment than to harass and penalize employers.
~ Henry Hazlitt - It is often sadly remarked that the bad economists present their errors to the public better than the good economists present their truths. It is often complained that demagogues can be more plausible in putting forward economic nonsense from the platform than the honest men who try to show what is wrong with it.
~ Henry Hazlitt - We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalist economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth & property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.
~ Adolph Hitler - To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
~ Thomas Jefferson - Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.
~ John Maynard Keynes
- The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.
~ John Maynard Keynes - Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults on the thoughts of the unthinking.
~ John Maynard Keynes - It is better that a man should tyrannise over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens; and whilst the former is sometimes denounced as being but a means to the latter, sometimes at least it is an alternative.
~ John Maynard Keynes - Goods move in response to price differences from points of low to points of higher price, the movement tending to obliterate the price difference and come to rest.
~ Frank Knight - There is no sense in making statements that will not continue to be true after they are made.
~ Frank Knight - Raising the minimum wage and lowering the barriers to union organization would carry a trade-off - higher unemployment. A better idea is to have the government subsidize low-wage employment. The earned-income tax credit for low-income workers - which has been the object of proposed cuts by both President Clinton and congressional Republicans - has been a positive step in this direction.
~ Paul Krugman - I’ve always believed that a speculative bubble need not lead to a recession, as long as interest rates are cut quickly enough to stimulate alternative investments. But I had to face the fact that speculative bubbles usually are followed by recessions. My excuse has been that this was because the policy makers moved too slowly — that central banks were typically too slow to cut interest rates in the face of a burst bubble, giving the downturn time to build up a lot of momentum.
~ Paul Krugman - In fact, I’d say that the sources of the economy’s expansion from 2003 to 2007 were, in order, the housing bubble, the war, and — very much in third place — tax cuts.
~ Paul Krugman - Close the weak banks and impose serious capital requirements on the strong ones...You see, it may sound hard-hearted, but you cannot keep unsound financial institutions operating simply because they provide jobs.
~ Paul Krugman, 1998 - Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.
~ Stephen Leacock - Only now did I recognize the reciprocal relationship which exists between manufacturing power and the national system of transportation, and that the one can never develop to its fullest without the other.
~ Friedrich List - Capital is that part of wealth which is devoted to obtaining further wealth.
~ Alfred Marshall - The hope that poverty and ignorance may gradually be extinguished derives indeed much support from the steady progress of the working classes during the 19th century.
~ Alfred Marshall - The theory of communism may be summed up in one sentence: abolish all private property.
~ Karl Marx - The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge.
~ Karl Marx - The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
~ Karl Marx - The aim of the popularization of economic studies is not to make every man an economist. The idea is to equip the citizen for his civic functions in community life.
~ Ludwig von Mises - A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.
~ Ludwig von Mises - German Marxian's coined the dictum: If socialism is against human nature, then human nature must be changed.
~ Ludwig von Mises - If one rejects laissez-faire on account of man's fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason reject every kind of government action.
~ Ludwig von Mises - Economically considered, war and revolution are always bad business.
~ Ludwig von Mises - Used to the conditions of a capitalistic environment, the average American takes it for granted that every year business makes something new and better accessible to him. Looking backward upon the years of his own life, he realizes that many implements that were totally unknown in the days of his youth and many others which at that time could be enjoyed only by a small minority are now standard equipment of almost every household.
~ Ludwig von Mises - The main propoganda trick of supporters of the allegedly "progressive" policy of government control is to blame capitalism for all that is unsatisfactory in present-day conditions and to extol the blessings of socialism. They have never attempted to prove their fallacious dogmas, all they did was to call their adversaries names and cast suspicion upon their motives. And, unfortunately, the average citizen cannot see through these stratagems. The liars must be afraid of the truth and are therefore driven to suppress its pronouncement.
~ Ludwig von Mises - The sad fact is, people are motivated by all sorts of bad ideas that keep us poorer than we otherwise could be.
~ Robert Murphy - While businesses are punished if they make a mistake, government regulators see their budgets grow with every bureaucrat's mistake.
~ Robert Murphy - The argument over "public" (aka government) funding of programs isn't about materialism versus idealism. On the contrary, its about letting citizens spend their money on whatever ventures they support, versus the politicians taking their money and spending it for them. People who insist on using politicians to trump the market are people who insist on government coercion rather than individual choice.
~ Robert Murphy - Any allegation of runaway capitalism has to be tempered by the observation that today we have the largest public sectors and the highest taxes the world has ever known.
~ Johan Norberg - As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for socialism is its adherents.
~ George Orwell - In my opinion nothing has contributed more to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country.
~ George Orwell - Give me the fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep the sterile truth for yourself.
~ Vilfredo Pareto - The historical experience of socialist countries has sadly demonstrated that collectivism does not go away with alienation but rather increases it, adding to it the lack of basic necessities and economic inefficiency.
~ Pope John Paul II - Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak. In Communism inequality comes from placing mediocrity on a level with excellence.
~ Francois Quesnay - "An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind."
~ Ayn Rand - Globalization and free trade do spur economic growth, and they lead to lower prices on many goods.
~ Robert Reich - The liberal ideal is that everyone should have fair access and fair opportunity. This is not equality fo result. Its equality of opportunity. There's a fundamental difference.
~ Robert Reich - There will always be a business cycle, and white-collar workers will get hit in the next recession like they always do in recessions.
~ Robert Reich - The slaves of socialism are slaves, but they are no one's property and therefore no one's loss.
~ George Reisman - If your corn has a herbicide-tolerant gene, it means you can pray your herbicides and kill the weeds; you won't kill your corn.
~ Jeremy Rifkin - Tax increases appear to have a very large sustained and highly significant negative impact on output. Since most of our exogenous tax changes are in fact reductions, the more intuitive way to express this result is that tax cuts have very large and persistent positive output effects
~ Christina Romer (Romer & Romer 2010) - Taxes are paid in the sweat of every man who labors. If those taxes are excessive, they are reflected in idle factories, in tax-sold farms, and in hordes of hungry people tramping streets and seeking jobs in vain.
~ FDR - This, by the way, is the welfare state in action: Its a whole bunch of special interest groups screwing consumers and taxpayers, and making them think they're really benefiting.
~ Murray Rothbard - There is one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian.
~ Murray Rothbard - Rights might be universal but their enforcement must be local.
~ Murray Rothbard - It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.
~ Murray Rothbard - “It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”
~ John Ruskin - “If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment -- assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. In America men often work long hours even when they are well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment; in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons.”
~ Bertrand Russell - The essence of Africa's crises is fundamentally it's extreme poverty.
~ Jeff Sachs - In Asia, a lot of successful economies that had been living on their own saving, decided to open up their financial markets to international capital in the early 1990s. So here were countries doing quite well, but they decided to borrow a bit more and do even better.
~ Jeff Sachs - It's not so unusual to run out of someone else's currency.
~ Jeff Sachs - Roosevelt talked not only about Freedom from Fear, but also Freedom from Want.
~ Jeff Sachs - America's government is not even aware of the gap between its commitments and action, because almost nobody in authority understands the actions that would be needed to meet the commitments.
~ Jeff Sachs - An intruiging paradox of the 1990s is that it isn't called a decade of greed.
~ Paul Samuelson - Politicians like to tell people what they want to hear - and what they want to hear is what won't happen.
~ Paul Samuelson - And for man to look upon himself as a capital good, even if it did not impair his freedom, may seem to debase him... by investing in themselves people can enlarge the range of choice available to them. It is one way free men can enhance their welfare.
~ Theodore Schultz - Eagles come in all shapes and sizes, but you will recognize them chiefly by their attitude.
~ EF Schumacher - It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world. And since, as Swift says, it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought.
~ Roger Scrunton - As we know, socialism is calculational chaos. Rational appraisement and allocation are eternally elusive. It is a gigantic negative-sum game in which each player quickly grabs a piece of the pie, and all the while the pie shrinks before the players' eyes. The welfare/warfare state, the interventionist state, is no improvement. Each intervention begets yet another. Bureaucracy is the only 'industry' guaranteed to experience growth. Each new regulation taxes the private sector, relentlessly shifting resources out of the hands of the productive, and into the hands of the unproductive. Capitalism is the only positive-sum game in town.
~ Larry Sechrest - A government debt is a government claim against private property – an unpaid tax bill.
~ Hans Sennholz - “Why should a financial engineer be paid four, four times... to a hundred times more than the, uh... real engineer? A real engineer build bridges, a financial engineer build, build dreams. And when those dream turn out to be nightmares, other people pay for it.”
~ Andrew Sheng - “In regards to the price of commodities, the rise of wages operates as simple interest does, the rise of profit operates like compound interest. Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”
~ Adam Smith - It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the banker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own interest.
~ Adam Smith - You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth -- and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated.
~ Tom Sowell - “Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.”
~ Tom Sowell - The more corrupt the state the more numerous the laws.
~ Tacitus - The real economic cleavage is not... between employers and employed, but between all who do constructive work, from scientist to laborer, on the one hand, and all whose main interest is the preservation of existing proprietary rights upon the other, irrespective of whether they contribute to constructive work or not.
~ RH Tawney - Trade and commerce, if they were not made of Indian rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way.
~ Henry David Thoreau - As for me, I am deeply a democrat; this is why I am in no way a socialist. Democracy and socialism cannot go together. You can't have it both ways... socialism is a new form of slavery.
~ Alexis de Tocqueville - Capitalism is relatively new in human history. Prior to capitalism the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering, and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man.
~ Walter Williams - “We have not noticed how fast the rest has risen. Most of the industrialized world--and a good part of the nonindustrialized world as well--has better cell phone service than the United States. Broadband is faster and cheaper across the industrial world, from Canada to France to Japan, and the United States now stands sixteenth in the world in broadband penetration per capita. Americans are constantly told by their politicians that the only thing we have to learn from other countries' health care systems is to be thankful for ours. Most Americans ignore the fact that a third of the country's public schools are totally dysfunctional (because their children go to the other two-thirds). The American litigation system is now routinely referred to as a huge cost to doing business, but no one dares propose any reform of it. Our mortgage deduction for housing costs a staggering $80 billion a year, and we are told it is crucial to support home ownership, except that Margaret Thatcher eliminated it in Britain, and yet that country has the same rate of home ownership as the United States. We rarely look around and notice other options and alternatives, convinced that "we're number one.”
~ Fareed Zakaria
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