Sheldon Richman Quotes

#1. It should go without saying that even the most narrowly construed eminent-domain power would violate individual rights. Either a person owns his legitimately acquired property or he does not.

Sheldon Richman

#2. Wealth comes from the production and exchange of goods and services. If someone efficiently produces a good that many people willingly trade their money for, he becomes wealthy.

Sheldon Richman

#3. The truly free market is the worker's best friend.

Sheldon Richman

#4. If people give up their attachment to expansive government, they will feel free to fight the income tax.

Sheldon Richman

#5. The alternative to the market process is government control, and we know where that principle leads.

Sheldon Richman

#6. In an unmolested market economy - one where all dealings are consensual - the 'allocation' of wealth and income is the result of transactions.

Sheldon Richman

#7. The housing and financial crisis could not have occurred in the absence of government housing and monetary policies.

Sheldon Richman

#8. Government spending reduces the capital that could be invested to serve consumers and to produce new employment opportunities.

Sheldon Richman

#9. No matter how much the government controls the economic system, any problem will be blamed on whatever small zone of freedom that remains.

Sheldon Richman

#10. The more power government has to provide things, the more power it has to dictate terms.

Sheldon Richman

#11. The state is an organization of mere mortals who, by one dubious method or another, have been allowed to don the mantle of political legitimacy and to command obedience on pain of imprisonment even of those who never consented to the preposterous arrangement.

Sheldon Richman

#12. People with an investment in government power will torture logic like a medieval inquisitor rather than face the facts ... There's a simple way to keep money out of politics: Keep politics out of our money.

Sheldon Richman

#13. Today, the people who would use guns to violate rights have little trouble getting them, while those who would use them to defend their rights have increasing trouble getting them ... Gun control is in effect a subsidy for criminals.

Sheldon Richman

#14. Government interference with the economic process represents a substitution of political for consumer objectives.

Sheldon Richman

#15. We must acknowledge, of course, that what looks like failure to us Americans outside the privileged elite may not actually be failure for our overlords.

Sheldon Richman

#16. Freedom is never more in peril than when politicians feel the pressure to 'do something.'

Sheldon Richman

#17. The government's coercive taxing power necessarily creates two classes: those who create and those who consume the wealth expropriated and transferred by that power.

Sheldon Richman