Top 100 A Free Market Quotes
#1. With all the mass media concentrated in a few hands, the ancient faith in the competition of ideas in the free market seems like a hollow echo of a much simpler day.
Kingman Brewster Jr.
#2. I would ask: Given the nature of free-market capitalism - where the rule is to rise to the top at all costs - is it possible to have a financial industry hero? And by the way, this is not a pop-culture trend we're talking about. There aren't many financial heroes in literature, theater or cinema.
Martin Scorsese
#3. The free market hasn't done a very good job "figuring out" how to pay workers enough. If it was solely up to the market, the people with the least power would be paid pennies ... or less.
David Rolf
#4. On issue after issue, the counterpoints to the conservative principle of the free market are the progressive principles of human dignity and the common good. We are interested in a market that serves human values, not humans who serve a market. Take
George Lakoff
#5. The government that came into power after the April 1994 elections was going to need a budget. It was drafted by our finance minister, Derek Keys, and he convinced them of the necessity to stay within the free-market principles that had been in force in South Africa for decades.
F. W. De Klerk
#6. 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.
Quentin R. Bufogle
#7. In a free market, one reaps what one sows, not what someone else sows.
Mark Hendrickson
#8. You show me a polluter, I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and force the public to pay his production costs.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
#9. From Chile to China to Iraq, torture has been a silent partner in the global free-market crusade.
Naomi Klein
#10. There's not a single country that actually approaches economics in a pure, free market, capitalist way. I like the free market - but it very much exists only in textbooks. If I had a choice, and we could live in a very pure world, I would be a supporter of the free markets.
Dambisa Moyo
#11. Capitalism is not a form of government. Capitalism is a symptom of freedom. It is the result of individual rights, which include property rights.
A.E. Samaan
#12. What private property does is connect effort to reward, creating an incentive for people to produce for more. Then, if there's a free market, people will trade their surpluses to others for the things they lack. Mutual exchange for mutual benefit makes the community richer.
John Stossel
#13. Now a great debate has been born. The thesis is Democratic Socialism. The antithesis is free-market capitalism. The Obama Democrats have posed the challenge. It is now up to the Republicans to pick it up and fight along these lines.
Dick Morris
#14. It is a free market that makes monopolies impossible.
Ayn Rand
#15. Trade and money, which go together in a stream of energy, inevitably wash away the enclosing walls of a society of status.
Isabel Paterson
#16. The free market is at its best when everybody works in a fish bowl and tells you their point of view ... The hedge funds and portfolio managers have a right to do this ... We've muted the analysts and their presence in the system.
Mario Gabelli
#17. I've been regulated my whole life. We have progressive taxes. It's not a free-market free-for-all. I completely understand that society has a perfectly legitimate right to put in structures and regulations and rules that make it fairer, better, cleaner.
Jamie Dimon
#18. In response to a suggestion that total free trade would end in cheaper foreign products flooding the market and causing unemployment.
Milton Friedman
#19. The good news is, Americans know firsthand the benefits of a free market - more choices, lower prices, higher quality - and there is no reason why we cannot help them see these same benefits in health care.
John Shadegg
#20. Handing out your creations for free is really a great way to market your product.
Simon Zingerman
#21. Secondly, as a result of this political favoritism, the FDA has become a primary factor in that formula whereby cartel-oriented companies in the food and drug industry are able to use the police powers of government to harass or destroy their free-market competitors.
G. Edward Griffin
#22. I am a strong believer in the free market. I am a strong believer in capitalism. But, I am also a strong believer that there are certain common goods - our air, our water, making sure that people are safe - that require to have some regulation.
Barack Obama
#23. The air we breathe is still free, but for how much time. I believe someone is busy patenting it to start selling it for profit
Bangambiki Habyarimana
#24. The reaper can be produced only in countries where labor receives a high reward, where farmers own their own acres without fear of being despoiled by invading armies, where average of intelligence is as high in the country as in the city.
Herbert Newton Casson
#25. The free market is not a god; we have to do everything we can to make the market competitive.
Michael Gove
#26. A depression is a large-scale decline in production and trade ... there is nothing in the nature of a free-market economy to cause such an event.
Nathaniel Branden
#27. The free market is constantly under attack from those who believe that they know how to make the world a better place with properly administered doses of state coercion.
George Leef
#28. The wonder of a free-market society is that we can all do our best to package our message in an entertaining fashion and present it - and then everybody votes with their footsteps.
Max Lucado
#29. The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.
Milton Friedman
#31. We know that in our free market economy some will prosper more than others. What we don't accept is the idea that some folks won't even get a chance.
Julian Castro
#32. If President Obama has his way, you won't recognize the government, the free market system, or, frankly, America as you once knew it. His admonitions and his audacious policy goals demonstrate very clear motives: equalize, discourage dissent, and become a nation of apologists.
Bob Ehrlich
#33. Scratch the surface at conservative think tanks and universities that house free-market economists, and it's not hard to find proponents of a carbon tax.
Nina Easton
#34. The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians.
Dwayne Andreas
#35. Though many intellectuals, following in the footsteps of Saints Augustine and Jerome, hold business people in contempt for their selfishness and greed, in fact a free market puts a premium on empathy.
Steven Pinker
#36. Because the free market system is so weak politically, the forms of capitalism that are experienced in many countries are very far from the ideal. They are a corrupted version, in which powerful interests prevent competition from playing its natural, healthy role.
Raghuram Rajan
#37. The challenge as we saw in the Nigerian project was to restructure the economy decisively in the direction of a modern free market as an appropriate environment for cultivation of freedom and democracy and the natural emergence of a new social order.
Ibrahim Babangida
#38. The IPL, involving the socialist principle of a salary cap and the protectionist mechanism of quotas, is not perhaps the best example of a market left flourishingly to its own devices and dynamics.
Gideon Haigh
#39. Once I really got into securities fraud prosecutions, I came to realize how central they were to the maintenance of a free market and how, in many ways, they are far more important to the welfare of our society than many of the more sensational criminal cases that one hears about.
Jed S. Rakoff
#40. Unless there is free and fair competition, there can't be healthy economic development. And what we have in Burma now is not an open-market economy that allows free and fair competition, but a form of colonialism makes a few people very, very wealthy. It's what you would crony capitalism.
Aung San Suu Kyi
#41. The existence of a free market does not of course eliminate the need for government. On the contrary, government is essential both as a forum for determining the "rule of the game" and as an umpire to interpret and enforce the rules decided on.
Milton Friedman
#42. People who promote the free market and growth are far more romantic, and far more ideologically driven and blinded by their vision than somebody who goes in and comments about the beauty of a forest or the stars in the sky.
Arundhati Roy
#44. In a true free market economy, you can't make yourself rich without enriching your community.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
#45. We know that government intervention in the free market, and Argentine history has shown this, absolutely ends in a boomerang.
Daniel Morgan
#46. I went out as a free agent in Boston and had a great year and I priced myself out of there market, at the time.
Johnny Damon
#47. Once an activity has been socialized, it is impossible to point out, by concrete example, how men in a free market could better conduct it. How, for instance, can one compare a socialized post office with private postal delivery when the latter has been outlawed?
Leonard Read
#48. The crisis of modern democracy is a profound one. Free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities available on sale to the highest bidder.
Arundhati Roy
#49. I reject the insurance model. I think we should have a free-market approach to healthcare.
Gary Johnson
#50. Global warming is a fact. Now it's up to liberals to make it a reality. Hence there is crucial importance in preventing powerful, greedy free market forces from getting in the way of worsening storms and rising sea levels. The Kyoto Accord is a good first step.
P. J. O'Rourke
#51. Almost everything wrong with our health care system comes from government interference with the free market. If the health care system is broken, then fix it. Don't try to invent a new one premised on all the bad ideas that are causing problems in the first place.
Ann Coulter
#52. An awful lot of food is thrown away. This you can call a spillover. It doesn't sort of enter into our economic system because it's a consequence of running things in a highly competitive way: the free market, global pricing and so on.
John Sulston
#53. The public has been sold a bill of goods about the free market being a panacea for mankind.
Tom Scholz
#54. Every time you cut programs, you take away a person who has a vested interest in high taxes and you put him on the tax rolls and make him a taxpayer. A farmer on subsidies is part welfare bum, whereas a free-market farmer is a small businessman with a gun.
Grover Norquist
#55. There prevails on a free labor market a tendency toward full employment.
Ludwig Von Mises
#56. The free market is not only a more efficient decision maker than even the wisest central planning body, but even more important, the free market keeps economic power widely dispersed.
Milton Friedman
#57. In the strict father model, the "free market" plays a significant, implicit role. The market is a competitive system where the disciplined are rewarded through profit, and the undisciplined (and hence immoral) are punished through poverty. The market is an instrument of morality.
George Lakoff
#58. We do not have free market capitalism in America; we have crony capitalism. There is a huge difference between free market capitalism that democratizes a country and makes us more efficient and prosperous and corporate crony capitalism.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
#59. One of O'Reilly's advantages is that we have a network of thousands of user groups to whom we give free books, to whom we advertise our products, and they spread the word. If you don't have that database, it's hard to get the attention of the market.
Tim O'Reilly
#60. A fact rarely suspected, let alone understood, is that businessmen are by no means the chief beneficiaries of the free market, private ownership, limited government way of life. Many business ventures fail entirely. Who then are the beneficiaries? The masses!
Leonard Read
#61. While free markets tend to democratize a society, unfettered capitalism leads invariably to corporate control of government.
Robert Kennedy
#62. Basically, on the question of Europe, I want to see a social Europe, a cohesive Europe, a coherent Europe, not a free market Europe.
Jeremy Corbyn
#63. I support freedom and I support a free market economy, but it should be a socially oriented market economy. I support globalization, but it should be globalization with a human face.
Mikhail Gorbachev
#64. People think the free market is a philosophy, they think that it is a creed. It is none of those things. Free market is a bathroom scale, it is a measuring tape, it's simply a measurement.
P. J. O'Rourke
#65. The death of the MG marks the end of one of the most perfect products of free enterprise, born out of the voracious will to succeed of one man and the burgeoning market for middle-class status symbols. The car first appeared as a souped-up Morris Oxford in 1923 when it won the Land's End Rally.
Nick Davies
#66. There can never be such a thing as a free market, because it is human nature to cheat, monopolize, and buy off others so as to corner the market.
Jane Smiley
#67. The basis of the free market is anytime you can generate revenue or profit, you've created value in excess of the resources you consume in a society. That's probably the most unbiased utility function there is, as opposed to someone's opinion.
Michael J. Saylor
#68. The free market has never worked in agriculture and it never will. The economics of a family farm are very different from a firm's ... the demand for food isn't elastic; people don't eat more just because food is cheap. Even if I go out of business this land will keep producing corn.
Michael Pollan
#69. When you have a perfect free market, it's difficult to predict the future. But when you have a market that is disturbed by government manipulations and money-printing, it's impossible to make any predictions.
Marc Faber
#70. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them.
Ha-Joon Chang
#71. Funny, I don't particularly care for either "laws" or "order". Liberty is messy. Freedom yields imperfect results.
A.E. Samaan
#72. A free economy is as essential to society as democratic political institutions. A strong market-based economy is the fertile ground for democratic freedoms that we think are important.
Lee R. Raymond
#73. None of us would trade freedom of expression for the narrowness of the public censor. America is a free market for people who have something to say, and need not fear to say it.
Hubert H. Humphrey
#74. I don't even consider myself an environmentalist anymore. I'm a free-marketer. I go out into the marketplace and I catch the polluters who are cheating the free market ...
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
#75. Generally speaking, we get the joke. We know that the free market is nonsense. We know that the whole point is to game the system, to beat the market or at least find someone who will pay you a lot of money, 'cause they're convinced that there is a free lunch.
Ron Bloom
#76. The Hispanic community understands the American Dream and have not forgotten what they were promised - that in the U.S., a free market system, allows us all to succeed economically, achieve stability and security for your family and leave your children better off than yourselves.
Marco Rubio
#77. I think that, especially among conservatives, there's a clear understanding that there are three legs to the conservative stool. There are the free-market economics conservatives, the social conservatives, and the national-security conservatives.
John Bolton
#78. A normal way that the American free market system has worked is that we have a process of unwinding. It's called bankruptcy. It doesn't mean, necessarily, that the industry is eclipsed or that it's gone. Often times, the phoenix rises out of the ashes.
Michele Bachmann
#79. There's something about China and its rush to capitalism that I find confusing. At the same time, we live in an America where capitalists oppose any government interference with free markets, while in China you have a very controlled, state-planned market where economic growth is better than ours.
David Henry Hwang
#80. The United States has grown into a remarkable nation specifically because of our independent spirit and free market.
Tammy Bruce
#81. Donating money to a few of my favorite free-market organizations used to be a pleasant duty, but now I'm literally inundated with demands from hundreds of think tanks and public-policy groups, all vying for my limited funds
Mark Skousen
#82. We cannot have a free market since it does not really set us free. It's free for interest, speculation and consumerism to create false needs.
Tariq Ramadan
#83. Just as the UK should withdraw from the EU and go back to the original European Economic Area principles of engagement with the continent, so also should it establish a free trade Commonwealth Market.
Przemek Skwirczynski
#84. 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.
Yuval Noah Harari
#85. I think here is the irony of American history. We don't have an established church. When you have an established church nobody takes religion as seriously as we do here. We have a free market in religion. The religious groups are competing with each other.
Eric Foner
#86. Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined 'free market' is the first step towards understanding capitalism.
Ha-Joon Chang
#87. There is no free market for oil. It's controlled by a cartel, OPEC.
Frederick W. Smith
#88. The free-market economist Friedrich von Hayek once said that "without a theory, the facts are silent." But for Greenspan, with his theory, the facts became invisible.
Anonymous
#89. Principles-and I have in mind such principles as states' rights or national sovereignty or the free market or pacifism-have a way of drying up while the sap of life goes flowing in another direction.
Max Lerner
#90. Since achieving their independence in 1992, the people of Croatia have built a democratic society based on the rule of law, respect for human rights, and a free market economy.
Elton Gallegly
#91. Inflation, being a fraudulent invasion of property, could not take place on the free market.
Murray Rothbard
#92. People are falling all over themselves to send you free shoes and free cufflinks and colonic irrigations for two. Nobody ever offers you a free acceptance speech. There just seems to be a gap in the market. I would love to be able to pull out a speech by Dolce & Gabbana.
Hugh Laurie
#93. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
Milton Friedman
#94. We like to think that a free market's greatest strength is its self-corrective nature.
Nina Easton
#95. Political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.
Ayn Rand
#96. The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.
Milton Friedman
#97. It is impossible to objectively define how free a market is. This is a political definition. Government is always involved, and those free marketers are as politically motivated as anyone.
Ha-Joon Chang
#98. The argument for the free market is a complicated and sophisticated one and depends on demonstration of secondary effects. I have confidence market efficiency will win out.
Milton Friedman
#99. When the Statist makes a wrong decision, its impact is far-reaching, for he uses the power of government to impose his decision on as many individuals and businesses as possible, which distorts the free market itself.
Mark Levin
#100. Liberty isn't everything. I just allows everything to happen.
A.E. Samaan
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