Top 100 Quotes About Free Market
#1. 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
#2. I am a free market Republican. I am against subsidies, in most cases.
Rudy Giuliani
#3. 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
#4. The picture of the free market is necessarily one of harmony and mutual benefit; the picture of State intervention is one of caste conflict, coercion, and exploitation.
Murray Rothbard
#5. A properly functioning free market system does not spring spontaneously from society's soil as crabgrass springs from suburban lawns. Rather, it is a complex creation of laws and mores ... Capitalism is a government program.
George Will
#7. The greatness of America is capitalism, free market capitalism. The exceptionalism of American business.
Fran Tarkenton
#8. It's critical to have a sound foundation in free-market economics and the Constitution. A great many Republicans in Washington don't have that foundation.
Ted Cruz
#9. If those with pre-existing conditions can be covered separately and removed from the broader insurance market, it would make it easier to create a functioning free market for everybody else.
Philip Klein
#10. Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State. The State has never been created by a "social contract"; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation.
Murray N. Rothbard
#11. Free market capitalism has done more for the soul of the human race than any other system - it's created the highest standard of living.
Chris Chocola
#13. I took the obligatory economics classes in school, but I've long been a fan of the Milton Friedman philosophy and its libertarian bent: One must be free to do what one wants to do, as long as you don't harm another. This is the seminal treatise on free-market economics.
Charlie Trotter
#14. I'm a free-market economist from years and years back, and I've never veered from that.
Alan Greenspan
#15. As long as you continue to tar social democracy with all the crimes of communism, I feel equally entitled to tar the free market with the crimes of slavery, segregation, colonialism and genocide; piss me off and I'll add fascism and the Nazis.
Greg Erwin
#16. Rich countries have 'kicked away the ladder' by forcing free-market, free-trade policies on poor countries. Already established countries do not want more competitors emerging through the nationalistic policies they themselves successfully used in the past.
Ha-Joon Chang
#17. Now, modern economies have a very effective mechanism for deciding if salaries are really too high: it's called the free market. That's how most people's salaries are set, after all, including those of major-league baseball players and European soccer players.
James Surowiecki
#18. The argument for collectivism is simple; free market is not.
Milton Friedman
#19. What should have died along with communism is the belief that modern societies can be run on a single principle, whether that of planning under the general will or that of free-market allocations.
Charles Taylor
#20. 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.
#21. Health care and education are too important NOT to be left to the free market.
Kevin D. Williamson
#22. 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
#23. Any time people create a "black market" to avoid government regulation, they are engaged in, and promoting, free market economics.
Dave Champion
#24. Free market is a market in which groups and individuals are differently represented. Parity in prosperity and performance between differently able individuals and groups can be achieved only by playing socialist leveler.
Ilana Mercer
#25. The costs of government are bound to be much higher than those of the free market ... The State cannot calculate well and therefore cannot gauge its costs accurately.
Murray Rothbard
#26. 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
#27. Californians devised a system of electricity sales that ignored every dimension of the free market.
P. J. O'Rourke
#28. Forcing free market plans to compete with these government-run programs would create an unlevel playing field and inevitably doom true competition ...
Mitch McConnell
#29. A vital function of the free market is to penalize inefficiency and misjudgment and to reward efficiency and good judgment. By distorting economic calculations and creating illusory profits, inflation will destroy this function.
Henry Hazlitt
#30. Free market capitalism is the best path to prosperity!
Lawrence Kudlow
#31. Let us have the candor to acknowledge that what we call "the economy" or "the free market" is less and less distinguishable from warfare.
Wendell Berry
#32. True, the free market ignores the poor precisely as it does not recognize the wealthy - it is 'no respecter of persons'
Leonard Read
#33. I believe in a free market of ideas and not shying away from debate.
Kevin McCarthy
#34. 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
#35. The American free market system is the greatest engine for prosperity and opportunity that the world has ever seen. Freedom works.
Ted Cruz
#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 advantage of the free market system is that people invest their capital, they create jobs by investing their capital, and hopefully they get a return on that investment. I don't think there's anything wrong with good old American capitalism.
Steve Stivers
#38. The trouble with a free market economy is that it requires so many policemen to make it work.
Dean Acheson
#39. A free market was never meant to be a free licence to take whatever you can get, however you can get it.
Barack Obama
#40. I was brought up on the proletarian left, and I remain there. The fair go for workers is fundamental, and I don't believe the free market has a mind.
Clive James
#41. 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
#42. Free market economists frequently see minimum wage legislation as mere political intervention. However, there are decent economic theories which show that, under certain circumstances, minimum wages can be beneficial, as it makes workers more productive.
Ha-Joon Chang
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. This is the opposite of the free market.
Bill Maher
#46. 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
#47. The free market is 'socialism' for the rich: the public pays the costs and the rich get the benefit - markets for the poor and plenty of state protection for the rich.
Noam Chomsky
#48. I'm not a communist - I believe in the free market and that entrepreneurs should be allowed to take risks because it creates wealth and jobs, but I draw the line at people risking other people's money. That's deplorable.
Stelios Haji-Ioannou
#49. But in the free market system, you're forced to change.
Roy Romer
#50. The Netherlands and the UK are both seafaring nations and so our ability to create jobs and to generate future growth is built on the free market.
Mark Rutte
#51. Letting the free market do whatever it wants. That's not been historically how we grow. We have to invest in education, in rebuilding broadband lines and roads and runways, and it's important that we bring back American manufacturing and regulations to prevent consumers from being cheated.
Barack Obama
#52. Democracy is acceptable to neo-liberals only in so far as it does not contradict the free market.
Ha-Joon Chang
#53. A market - any market - requires that government make and enforce the rules of the game. In most modern democracies, such rules emanate from legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts. Government doesn't "intrude" on the "free market." It creates the market.
Robert B. Reich
#54. 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
#55. Few countries have become rich through free-trade, free-market policies, and few ever will.
Ha-Joon Chang
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. I became a real free market fanatic. I'm probably less so now than even two or three years ago.
Esther Dyson
#60. When it comes to jobs, jobs are just like products in the sense that the free market operates and sees that somebody gets paid what they're worth.
Wayne Rogers
#61. Haitian rice farmers are quite efficient, but they can't compete with U.S. agribusiness that relies on a huge government subsidy, thanks to Ronald Reagan's free market enthusiasms.
Noam Chomsky
#62. The second part of the New Right's policy package has been the belief that free-market solutions are always best. It is this latter view which is profoundly mistaken. Markets and profits are crucial, but the pure free-market model itself is deeply flawed.
Paul Ormerod
#63. ...we should in the interests of accuracy refer not to 'democratic free market capitalism' but to 'plutocratic impunity capitalism'.
Robert Wade
#64. The history of capitalism has been so totally re-written that many people in the rich world do not perceive the historical double standards involved in recommending free trade and free market to developing countries.
Ha-Joon Chang
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. The black market was a way of getting around government controls. It was a way of enabling the free market to work. It was a way of opening up, enabling people.
Milton Friedman
#68. Democracy no longer means what it was meant to. It has been taken back into the workshop. Each of its institutions has been hollowed out, and it has been returned to us as a vehicle for the free market, of the corporations. For the corporations, by the corporations.
Arundhati Roy
#69. Materialism and consumerism are merely emergent properties of our neurobiology given free rein in a free market.
Piers Steel
#70. The Free Market is Mother Nature's way of organizing economic activity.
David D. Aitken
#71. 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.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
#72. 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
#73. Voluntary association produces the free market - where each person can choose among a multitude of possibilities.
Harry Browne
#74. In the free market, a man born into wealth or who has otherwise acquired great riches can lose his fortune depending on how he chooses to behave. Conversely, a man born into poverty or who has lost wealth once obtained can acquire a fortune, depending, again, on how he chooses to behave.
Mark Levin
#75. You can't just pillory the teachers unions and sound the free market trumpet. We must visit the failing schools. We must talk to the mother who desperately wants more for her child and offer a constructive way out. We can't simply lambaste ... food stamps or decry dependency.
Frank Wolf
#76. 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
#77. The Internet is a powerful example of free speech and the free market in action; it is curious that the Net has alarmed the lawmakers of a nation founded on those principles.
Denise Caruso
#78. Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at.
Murray Rothbard
#79. some supporters of the unrestrained free market have found that dogma: the claim that science is nothing more than politics.
Timothy Snyder
#80. 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
#81. What free-market economists are not telling us is that the politics they want to get rid of are none other than those of democracy itself. When they say we need to insulate economic policies from politics, they are in effect advocating the castration of democracy.
Ha-Joon Chang
#82. You can use principles of the free market to drive social change.
Leila Janah
#83. They [free market policies] were never based on solid empirical and theoretical foundations, and even as many of these policies were being pushed, academic economists were explaining the limitations of markets for instance, whenever information is imperfect, which is to say always.
Joseph Stiglitz
#84. Somewhere along the way to free-market capitalism, the United States became the most wasteful society on the planet.
Paul Hawken
#85. It is not so evident why intellectuals need the State. Put simply, we may state that the intellectual's livelihood in the free market is never too secure.
Murray N. Rothbard
#86. I believe that free-market principles will solve our healthcare problems.
Rick Scott
#87. 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
#88. We who live in free market societies believe that growth, prosperity and ultimately human fulfillment, are created from the bottom up, not the government down.
Ronald Reagan
#89. The credit crunch was based on a climate (the post-Cold War victory party of free-market capitalism), a problem (the sub-prime mortgages), a mistake (the mathematical models of risk) and a failure, that of the regulators.
John Lanchester
#91. From computers to information technology to airplanes, it has been America's unique blend of republican government and free-market capitalism that has allowed us to surpass all other nations in history.
George Nethercutt
#92. The American people are being victimized more than any free market would warrant.
Gordon Smith
#93. Contrary to the vision of the left, it was the free market which produced affordable housing - before government intervention made housing unaffordable.
Thomas Sowell
#94. [TARP] The strategy was a breakthrough intervention in the free market.
George W. Bush
#95. 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
#96. The free market tells us what people are willing to pay for a given thing at a given moment. That's all the free market does. The free market is a bathroom scale. We may not like what we see when we step on the bathroom scale, but we can't pass a law making ourselves weigh 165.
P. J. O'Rourke
#97. The free market is ugly and stupid, like going to the mall; the unfree market is just as ugly and just as stupid, except there is nothing in the mall and if you don't go there they shoot you.
P. J. O'Rourke
#98. I am far more a fan of aggressive entrepreneurs than I am of major CEOs. You look at major CEOs, and they are almost to a person quite timid. They don't act to defend the free market principles that are vital to growth.
Ted Cruz
#99. The only salvation of the world today ... is the rapid dissemination of the basic values of the West, that is, the ideas of democracy, human rights, the civil society, and the free market.
Vaclav Havel
#100. Just as in our bodies, every cell must first be "Celfish"; solely responsible for its own survival and once those conditions are met, the value is passed on. That is Free Market Capitalism at the cellular level.
Carl T. Johnson
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