Top 100 A Free Market Quotes
#1. 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
#2. In a free market, one reaps what one sows, not what someone else sows.
Mark Hendrickson
#3. 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
#4. It is a free market that makes monopolies impossible.
Ayn Rand
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians.
Dwayne Andreas
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#14. 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
#15. I reject the insurance model. I think we should have a free-market approach to healthcare.
Gary Johnson
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. We like to think that a free market's greatest strength is its self-corrective nature.
Nina Easton
#26. Political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.
Ayn Rand
#27. The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.
Milton Friedman
#28. I am a free market Republican. I am against subsidies, in most cases.
Rudy Giuliani
#29. The great allure of government programs in general for many people is that these programs allow decisions to be made without having to worry about the constraints of prices, which confront people at every turn in a free market.
Thomas Sowell
#30. I'm a free-market economist from years and years back, and I've never veered from that.
Alan Greenspan
#31. This is the marketplace of political ideas. This is how America operates. It's a free market. It's free-wheeling. From the outside, it looks unpredictable. There's a circus-like free market.
Jon Huntsman Jr.
#32. The myth of "free choice" begins with "free market" and "free trade". When five transnational corporations control the seed market, it is not a free market, it is a cartel.
Vandana Shiva
#33. Let's face a historical truth: we have never had a "free market", we have always had government intervention in the economy, and indeed that intervention has been welcomed by the captains of finance and industry. They had no quarrel with "big government" when it served their needs.
Howard Zinn
#34. I believe in a free market of ideas and not shying away from debate.
Kevin McCarthy
#35. For example, people who don't know how to drive may nevertheless want to drive their car. But society feels that it is better if they don't, because of what it means for the rest of us. A free market in driver's licenses obviously cannot solve this problem.
Abhijit V. Banerjee
#36. The way to get a maximum rate of 'economic growth' assuming this to be our aim - is to give maximum encouragement to production, employment, saving, and investment. And the way to do this is to maintain a free market and a sound currency.
Henry Hazlitt
#37. The trouble with a free market economy is that it requires so many policemen to make it work.
Dean Acheson
#38. A free market was never meant to be a free licence to take whatever you can get, however you can get it.
Barack Obama
#39. It had been well known for twenty years that the distribution of large and small earthquakes followed a particular mathematical pattern, precisely the same scaling pattern that seemed to govern the distribution of personal incomes in a free-market economy.
James Gleick
#40. The theory of the determination of wages in a free market is simply a special case of the general theory of value. Wages are the price of labour.
Sir John Richard Hicks
#41. Technology determines the possibilities of society. It doesn't matter whether you start out from a fascist state or a communist state or a free-market state.
Iain Banks
#42. All the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to businessmen and to capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy or by a free market, but by government intervention into the economy.
Ayn Rand
#43. The great virtue of a free market is that it enables people who hate each other, or who are from vastly different religious or ethnic backgrounds, to cooperate economically. Government intervention can't do that.
Milton Friedman
#44. The more central problem of money in politics is something just as troubling but much harder to see: a system in which economic inequalities, inevitable in a free market economy, are transformed into political inequalities that affect both electoral and legislative outcomes.
Richard L. Hasen
#45. There's no limit to what free men and free women in a free market with free enterprise can accomplish when people are free to follow their dream.
Jack Kemp
#46. I am a conservative Republican, a firm believer in free market capitalism. A free market system allows all parties to compete, which ensures the best and most competitive project emerges, and ensures a fair, democratic process.
Sarah Palin
#47. I know of no example in time or place of a society that has been marked by a large measure of political freedom, and that has not also used something comparable to a free market to organize the bulk of economic activity.
Milton Friedman
#48. The idea of a "free market" separate and distinct from government has functioned as a useful cover for those who do not want the market mechanism fully exposed. They have had the most influence over it and would rather keep it that way. The mythology is useful precisely because it hides their power.
Robert B. Reich
#49. We no longer have a free market in the United States, we have a government controlled free market.
Jim Bunning
#50. Tell me, what do they do for us in Bulgaria? Do they fix the prices? Or is there some kind of a free market?
Dwayne Andreas
#51. I'm a free market person, a free trader. But if we had a market in California, there would be competition.
Anna Eshoo
#52. President Obama insists he's a free-market guy. But you have to wonder whether he understands how a free economy really works.
Fred Barnes
#53. The food system is not a free market. In this country, we impose reasonably high standards of animal welfare - but we haven't applied the same standards to food we import, so all we're really doing is exporting cruelty from Britain elsewhere, and at the same time undermining our farmers.
Zac Goldsmith
#54. The advertising profession transformed the capitalist model of buyers making
rational choices in a free market into a consumerist model where the buyer was
driven by irrational emotions associated with particular brand names and/or
products.
Joel Spring
#55. There's a difference between a free market and free-for-all market.
Bob Menendez
#56. In the 19th century, a lot of people were against outlawing child labour, because to do so would be against the very foundations of a free market economy: 'These children want to work, these people want to employ them ... what is your problem? It's not as if anyone has kidnapped them ... '
Brian Eno
#57. The transparency and intelligibility of a country with a free market economy can reassure its neighbors that it is not going on a war footing, which can defuse a Hobbesian trap and cramp a leader's freedom to engage in risky bluffing and brinkmanship.
Steven Pinker
#59. The War on Drugs employs millions - politicians, bureaucrats, policemen, and now the military - that probably couldn't find a place for their dubious talents in a free market, unless they were to sell pencils from a tin cup on street corners.
L. Neil Smith
#60. 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
Robert Kenner
#61. Few ideas have more profoundly poisoned the minds of more people than the notion of a "free market" existing somewhere in the universe, into which government "intrudes.
Robert B. Reich
#62. I find it quite useful to think of a free-market economy - or partly free market economy - as sort of the equivalent of an ecosystem. Just as animals flourish in niches, people who specialize in some narrow niche can do very well.
Charlie Munger
#63. Materialism and consumerism are merely emergent properties of our neurobiology given free rein in a free market.
Piers Steel
#64. 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.
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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.
#70. From Chile to China to Iraq, torture has been a silent partner in the global free-market crusade.
Naomi Klein
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. Trade and money, which go together in a stream of energy, inevitably wash away the enclosing walls of a society of status.
Isabel Paterson
#75. 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
#76. In response to a suggestion that total free trade would end in cheaper foreign products flooding the market and causing unemployment.
Milton Friedman
#77. Handing out your creations for free is really a great way to market your product.
Simon Zingerman
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. The free market is not a god; we have to do everything we can to make the market competitive.
Michael Gove
#83. 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
#84. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. In a true free market economy, you can't make yourself rich without enriching your community.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
#95. We know that government intervention in the free market, and Argentine history has shown this, absolutely ends in a boomerang.
Daniel Morgan
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
