Quotes by Economists - Page 13

Government is a gang, but not merely as meritorious as a private gang because it claims legal legitimacy. It pillages and uses violence but under the cover of law, and seeks legitimacy not through competition but through the myth of the social contract.
Jeffrey Tucker
The government enforces a monopoly over the production and distribution of its alleged 'services' and brings violence to bear against would-be competitors. In so doing, it reveals the fraud at the heart of its impudent claims and gives sufficient proof that it is not a genuine protector, but a mere protection racket.
Robert Higgs
If the bulk of the public were really convinced of the illegitimacy of the State, if it were convinced that the State is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large, then the State would soon collapse to take on no more status or breadth of existence than another Mafia gang.
Murray N. Rothbard
The goal of libertarianism is not to permit people to be free, but to make them realize that they don't need anyone's permission to be free.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Whoever fails in the consideration generally due to the interests and feelings of others, not being compelled by some more imperative duty, or justified by allowable self-preference, is a subject of moral disapprobation for that failure, but not for the cause of it, nor for the errors, merely personal to himself, which may have remotely led to it. In like manner, when a person disables himself, by conduct purely self-regarding, from the performance of some definite duty incumbent on him to the public, he is guilty of a social offence. No person ought to be punished simply for being drunk; but a soldier or a policeman should be punished for being drunk on duty.
John Stuart Mill
The greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of Custom is complete. This is the case over the whole East. Custom is there, in all things, the final appeal; justice and right mean conformity to custom; the argument of custom no one, unless some tyrant intoxicated with power, thinks of resisting. And we see the result. Those nations must once have had originality; they did not start out of the ground populous, lettered, and versed in many of the arts of life; they made themselves all this, and were then the greatest and most powerful nations in the world. What are they now? The subjects or dependants of tribes whose forefathers wandered in the forests when theirs had magnificent palaces and gorgeous temples, but over whom custom exercised only a divided rule with liberty and progress.
John Stuart Mill
Money is not an invention of the state. It is not the product of a legislative act. Even the sanction of political authority is not necessary for its existence. Certain commodities came to be money quite naturally, as the result of economic relationships that were independent of the power of the state.
Carl Menger
The free market is not a system. It is not a policy dictated by anyone in particular. It is not something that Washington implements. It does not exist in any legislation, law, bill, regulation, or book. It is what you get when people act on their own, entirely without central direction, and with their own property, and within human associations of their own creation and in their own interest. It is the beauty that emerges in absence of control.
Jeffrey Tucker
To eliminate statism is not to physically subdue the rulers, but to mentally liberate the ruled.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
Here's something I still can't get over. Amazes and thrills me every time. I'm sitting here and want a certain book. So I search, click, and then I have the book. Every time, my heart does a little leap of joy. What a beautiful world the market is making.
Jeffrey Tucker
To create a free society is not to accomplish the impossible task of convincing all people to abandon aggression, but to accomplish the essential task of convincing enough people to abandon the belief that aggression is ever legitimate.
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
The profit of the one is the profit of the other.
Frédéric Bastiat
The 'free' laborer, thanks to the development of capitalistic production, agrees, i.e. is compelled by social conditions, to sell the whole of his active life, his birthright for a mass of pottage.
Karl Marx
Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.
Karl Marx
Everyone should be able to attend to his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their nose in.
Karl Marx
Man is the highest essence of man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence.
Karl Marx
Who talks most about freedom and equality? Is it not those who hold the bill of rights in one hand and a whip for affrighted slaves in the other?
Alexander Hamilton
People who can't imagine order without imposition always end up favoring power over liberty.
Jeffrey Tucker
We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.
John Stuart Mill
The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited, he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.
John Stuart Mill
Even despotism does not produce its worst effects, so long as individuality exists under it; and whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.
John Stuart Mill
When Alexander the Great visited the philosopher Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for him, Diogenes is said to have replied: ‘Yes, stand a little less between me and the sun.’ It is what every citizen is entitled to ask of his government.
Henry Hazlitt
The world is vast, beautiful, and fascinating… even awe-inspiring, but impersonal. It demands nothing of me, and allows me to demand nothing of it.
Herbert Simon
It opens the mind toward an understanding of humannature and destiny. It increases wisdom. It is the veryessence of that much misinterpreted concept, a liberaleducation. It is the foremost approach to humanism,the lore of the specifically human concerns that distinguishman from other living beings. . . . Personal cultureis more than mere familiarity with the presentstate of science, technology, and civic affairs. It ismore than acquaintance with books and paintings andthe experience of travel and of visits to museums. It isthe assimilation of the ideas that roused mankind fromthe inert routine of a merely animal existence to a lifeof reasoning and speculating. It is the individual’seffort to humanize himself by partaking in the traditionof all the best that earlier generations havebequeathed.
Ludwig von Mises
The great misfortune of our generation is that the direction which by the amazing progress of the natural sciences has been given to its interests is not one which assists us in comprehending the larger process of which as individuals we form merely a part or in appreciating how we constantly contribute to a common effort without either directing it or submitting to orders of others.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Times of stress and difficulty are seasons of opportunity when the seeds of progress are sown.
Thomas F. Woodlock
Equality of opportunity is not enough. Unless we create an environment where everyone is guaranteed some minimum capabilities through some guarantee of minimum income, education, and healthcare, we cannot say that we have fair competition. When some people have to run a 100 metre race with sandbags on their legs, the fact that no one is allowed to have a head start does not make the race fair. Equality of opportunity is absolutely necessary but not sufficient in building a genuinely fair and efficient society.
Ha-Joon Chang
Romanticism is man's revolt against reason, as well as against the condition under which nature has compelled him to live.
Ludwig von Mises
Cultures that do not wish to exist cannot be dissuaded from destroying themselves.
David P. Goldman
It takes no more research than a trip to almost any public library or college to show the incredibly lopsided coverage of slavery in the United States or in the Western Hemisphere, as compared to the meager writings on even larger number of Africans enslaved in the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa, not to mention the vast numbers of Europeans also enslaved in centuries past in the Islamic world and within Europe itself. At least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates alone from 1500 to 1800, and some Europeans slaves were still being sold on the auction blocks in the Egypt, years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks in the United States.
Thomas Sowell
Pride of opinion has been responsible for the downfall of more men on Wall Street than any other factor.
Charles Henry Dow
If I were asked to name the deadliest subversive force within capitalism--the single greatest source of its waning morality--I should without hesitation name advertising. How else should one identify a force that debases language, drains thought, and undoes dignity? If the barrage of advertising, unchanged in its tone and texture, were devoted to some other purpose--say the exaltation of the public sector--it would be recognized in a moment for the corrosive element that it is. But as the voice of the private sector it escapes this startled notice. I mention it only to point out that a deep source of moral decay for capitalism arises from its own doings, not from that of its governing institutions.
Robert L. Hellbroner
The beliefs which we have the most warrant for have no safeguard, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.
John Stuart Mill
("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?
Lawrence W. Reed
Freedom has a cost, which is borne by individuals who make bad choices, and by a society that feels obligated to help them.
Daniel Kahneman
There will always exist inequalities which will appear unjust to those who suffer from them, disappointments which will appear unmerited, and strokes of misfortune which those hit have not deserved. But when these things occur in a society which is consciously directed, the way in which people will react will be very different from what it is when they are nobody's conscious choice.
Friedrich A. Hayek
It is a choice, and therefore within the province of economics.
Jason Potts
Given greater freedom about where to send their children, parents of a kind would flock together and so prevent a healthy intermingling of children from decidedly different backgrounds.
Milton Friedman
He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties.
John Stuart Mill
Some experimenters have reported that an angry face “pops out” of a crowd of happy faces, but a single happy face does not stand out in an angry crowd. The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.
Daniel Kahneman
The risk-bearing role of the rich cannot be performed so well by anyone else. The benefits of capitalism still depend on capitalists. The other groups on the pyramid of wealth should occasionally turn from the spectacles of consumption long enough to see the adventure on the frontiers of the economy above them - an adventure not without its note of nobility...
George Gilder
Every man must have a philosophy of life, for everyone must have a standard by which to measure his conduct. And philosophy is nothing but a standard by which to measure.
B.R. Ambedkar
Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say the present-day relations--the relations of bourgeois production--are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and, as such, eternal.
Karl Marx
If we consistently act on the optimistic hypothesis, this hypothesis will tend to be realised; whilst by acting on the pessimistic hypothesis we can keep ourselves for ever in the pit of want.
John Maynard Keynes
In the Soviet Union we have a saying, a pessimist is someone who believes things can't get any worse. An optimist thinks maybe they can.
Abel Aganbegyan
We're fragile things, Harb. It doesn't look like it but we are. We're here one minute, and just like that, we're gone. The Peacemakers (The Nemesis Engines)
Olivier A. Blanchard
The assumption that we are infallible can we justify the suppression of opinions we think false. Ages are as fallible as individuals, every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd.
John Stuart Mill
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
John Maynard Keynes
It is therefore scientifically correct to say that 'natural selection has been proved to be an agent of evolutionary change' - we can, in fact, prove it by doing. But it is totally illegitimate to claim that the discovery of this mechanism - natural selection - proves that the cause of evolution 'was automatic with no room for divine guidance or design'.
Ernst F. Schumacher
It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.
Leon C. Megginson
I should be inclined, therefore, as I have hinted before, to consider the world and this life as the mighty process of God, not for the trial, but for the creation and formation of mind, a process necessary to awaken inert, chaotic matter into spirit, to sublimate the dust of the earth into soul, to elicit an ethereal spark from the clod of clay. And in this view of the subject, the various impressions and excitements which man receives through life may be considered as the forming hand of his Creator, acting by general laws, and awakening his sluggish existence, by the animating touches of the Divinity, into a capacity of superior enjoyment. The original sin of man is the torpor and corruption of the chaotic matter in which he may be said to be born.
Thomas Robert Malthus
Programmers have a saying: "garbage in, garbage out.
Paul Krugman
For a successful revolution it is not enough that there is discontent. What is required is a profound and thorough conviction of the justice, necessity and importance of political and social rights.
B.R. Ambedkar
If a theory of justice is to guide reasoned choice of policies, strategies or institutions, then the identification of fully just social arrangements is neither necessary nor sufficient.
Amartya Sen
People and their values are almost infinitely diverse, and people will never agree on many elements of social arrangements that might be subjected to uniform rules of governance. Hence, the greater the scope of strictly individual self-determination, the lesser the scope of governance, and the greater the tolerance with which people live and let live among their fellows, the more peaceful and flourishing society will be
Robert Higgs
It takes a common thug to commit injustice, but it takes an exceptional thug to call it "social justice".
Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski
To understand the world is never a matter of simply recording our immediate perceptions. Understanding inescapably involves reasoning.We have to 'read' what we feel and seem to see, and ask what those perceptions indicate and how we may take them into account without being overwhelmed by them. One issue relates to the reliability of our feelings and impressions. A sense of injustice could serve as a signal that moves us, but a signal does demand critical examination, and there has to be some scrutiny of the soundness of aconclusion based mainly on signals...We also have to ask what kinds of reasoning should count in the assessment of ethical and political concepts such as justice and injustice.
Amartya Sen
Lamenting the vagaries of fate may leave us with a galling sense of helpless frustration, which many escape by transforming the tragedy of the human condition into the specific sins of specific societies. This turns an insoluble problem of cosmic justice into an apparently manageable issue of social justice. Since the sins of human beings are virtually inexhaustible, there is seldom a lack of examples of wrongdoing to which intergroup differences can be attributed, rightly or wrongly. Where the quest for injustice is over-riding, among the things it over-rides are logic and evidence.
Thomas Sowell
As man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
It is essential that justice be done, it is equally vital that justice not be confused with revenge, for the two are wholly different.
Oscar Arias