Best 143 quotes in «free market quotes» category

There is no more precious currency than the unfettered liberty to explore while engaged in an "Idea Economy". You cannot centrally plan the "Idea Economy" any more than you can plan fun or spontaneity. Regulations are restraints in an "Idea Economy". The entrepreneur is either free to experiment or not.

There is not the slightest analogy between playing games and the conduct of business within a market society. The card player wins money by outsmarting his antagonist. The businessman makes money by supplying customers with goods they want to acquire.

The valuations which result in determination of definite prices are different. Each party attaches a higher value to the good he receives than to that he gives away. The exchange ratio, the price, is not the product of equality of valuation, but on the contrary, the product of a discrepancy in valuation.

Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force — for the same reason — cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.

This is the fly in the ointment of free-market capitalism. It cannot ensure that profits are gained in a fair way, or distributed in a fair manner. On the contrary, the craving to increase profits and production blinds people to anything that might stand in the way.

True, t is only individuals who starve, but what security has the working-man that it may not be his turn tomorrow? Who assures him employment, who vouches for it that, if for any reason or no reason his lord and master discharges him tomorrow, he can struggle along with those dependant upon him, until he may find some one else 'to give him bread'? Who guarantees that willingness to work shall suffice to obtain work, that uprightness, industry, thrift, and the rest of the virtues recommended by the bourgeoisie, are really his road to happiness? No one. He knows that every breeze that blows, every whim of his employer, every bad turn of trade may hurl him back into the fierce whirlpool from which he has temporarily saved himself, and in which it is hard and often impossible to keep his head above water. He knows that, though he may have the means of living today, it is very uncertain whether he shall tomorrow.

To live in a state of liberty is not to live apart from law. It is, on the contrary, to live under the highest law, the only law that can really profit a man, the law which is consciously and deliberately imposed by himself on himself.

We are not for making shoes, so the shoemakers can have jobs, but so we can wear the shoes.

Ultimately, all arguments against markets are arguments against anarchy. Marx understood this much, at least.

We know how the people of Argentina ruined their country. We know how the people of Venezuela ruined their country. Few Americans know much about the history of Argentina or Venezuela. But if they wish to know how the people of the USA are ruining their own country, all they have to do is look around themselves, including, in most cases, looking in the mirror.

When did a free country start to mean free enterprise? Who sold Democracy out for a golden calf we got to idolize?

Well, it depends which planned economies you mean. There are lots of planned economies―the United States is a planned economy, for example. I mean, we talk about ourselves as a "free market," but that's baloney. The only parts of the U.S. economy that are internationally competitive are the planned parts, the state-subsidized parts―like capital-intensive agriculture (which has a state-guaranteed market as a cushion in case there are excesses); or high-technology industry (which is dependent on the Pentagon system); or pharmaceuticals (which is massively subsidized by publicly-funded research). Those are the parts of the U.S. economy that are functioning well. And if you go to the East Asian countries that are supposed to be the big economic successes―you know, what everybody talks about as a triumph of free-market democracy—they don't even have the most remote relation to free-market democracy: formally speaking they're fascist, they're state-organized economies run in cooperation with big conglomerates. That's precisely fascism, it's not the free market. Now, that kind of planned economy "works," in a way―it produces at least. Other kinds of command economies don't work, or work differently: for example, the Eastern European planned economies in the Soviet era were highly centralized, over-bureaucratized, and they worked very inefficiently, although they did provide a kind of minimal safety-net for people. But all of these systems have been very anti-democratic―like, in the Soviet Union, there were virtually no peasants or workers involved in any decision-making process.

We preach about capitalism and the beauty of unfettered market forces determining price--but not when it comes to gas. When it comes to gas, we need it cheap, and the president had better get it for us, or else, we don't care how.

What ranks above all else for economic and political reconstruction is a radical change of ideologies. Economic prosperity is not so much a material problem; it is, first of all, an intellectual, spiritual, and moral problem.

What we have eaten in advance in recent decades in the paper credit binge, we will have to starve for in coming decades.

When unions get higher wages for their members by restricting entry into an occupation, those higher wages are at the expense of other workers who find their opportunities reduced. When government pays its employees higher wages, those higher wages are at the expense of the taxpayer. But when workers get higher wages and better working conditions through the free market, when they get raises by firm competing with one another for the best workers, by workers competing with one another for the best jobs, those higher wages are at nobody's expense. They can only come from higher productivity, greater capital investment, more widely diffused skills. The whole pie is bigger - there's more for the worker, but there's also more for the employer, the investor, the consumer, and even the tax collector. That's the way the free market system distributes the fruits of economic progress among all people. That's the secret of the enormous improvements in the conditions of the working person over the past two centuries.

While liberals are in favor of any sexual activity engaged in by two consenting adults, when these consenting adults engage in trade or exchange, the liberals step in to harass, cripple, restrict, or prohibit that trade. And yet both the consenting sexual activity and the trade are similar expressions of liberty in action.

When you live in the United States, with the roar of the free market, the roar of this huge military power, the roar of being at the heart of empire, it's hard to hear the whispering of the rest of the world. And I think many US citizens want to. I don't think that all of them necessarily are co-conspirators in this concept of empire. And those who are not, need to listen to other stories in the world - other voices, other people.

Where there is commerce there is peace.

A free market was never meant to be a free licence to take whatever you can get, however you can get it.

Why anarchy? Because anything less would be uncivilized.

Columbus did not seek a new route to the Indies in response to a majority directive.

Free markets are the real people's revolution.

Free-market capitalism, in the blink of an eye, was gutted and replaced by an oligopoly.

Free market capitalism is the best path to prosperity!

Free markets select for winning solutions.

Free trade or the free market means the sovereignty of the consumer.

If you live in a free market and a free society, shouldn't you have the right to know what you're buying? It's shocking that we don't and it's shocking how much is kept from us.

I am a free market Republican. I am against subsidies, in most cases.

I am not in favor of a traditional free market.

I can't concern myself with how viewers feel.

It is not uncommon to suppose that the free exchange of property in markets and capitalism are one and the same. They are not. While capitalism operates through the free market, free markets don't require capitalism.

Inflation, being a fraudulent invasion of property, could not take place on the free market.

I think that there is absolutely no free market in modern industrial states.

It really is not that complicated, I just don’t understand HOW people don’t grasp the concept of ‘Free Market’, and why left alone, it WORKS!

Ronald Reagan believes in the free market like some people believe in unicorns.

Let us have the candor to acknowledge that what we call "the economy" or "the free market" is less and less distinguishable from warfare.

Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own.

No one spends someone elses money as carefully as he spends his own.

Personally, I always find it especially piquant when cultural conservatives, usually quick to profess their devotion to the Free Market, rail against the success in said market of some product of which they disapprove.

The free market allowed shock jocks to flourish, and millions of listeners apparently enjoyed the rant.

The broader and more influential organisations of businessmen have acted to undermine the basic foundation of the free market system they purport to represent and defend.

The American people are being victimized more than any free market would warrant.

The American free market system is the greatest engine for prosperity and opportunity that the world has ever seen. Freedom works.

There is no free market in oil.

The historical debate is over. The answer is free-market capitalism.

The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians.

There are different ways to organise capitalism. Free-market capitalism is only one of them-and not a very good one at that.

There is no free market for oil. It's controlled by a cartel, OPEC.

There is no pure free-market economy.