Top 100 Quotes About Free Trade
#3. Technology is probably the single biggest driver of productivity gains for the developed countries. For example, I think it's much more important than free trade.
Peter Thiel
#4. In response to a suggestion that total free trade would end in cheaper foreign products flooding the market and causing unemployment.
Milton Friedman
#5. Unfortunately, the United States has entered into several free trade agreements that do not sufficiently protect and support our manufacturing industries and the millions of American workers they employ.
Dan Kildee
#6. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.
Karl Marx
#7. Not only must we fight to end disastrous unfettered free trade agreements with China, Mexico, and other low wage countries, we must fight to fundamentally rewrite our trade agreements so that American products, not jobs, are our number one export.
Bernie Sanders
#8. I am convinced that both markets and free trade are good, but the traditional answer that we give to students to explain why they are good, the one based on perfect competition and Pareto optimality, is becoming untenable. Something much more interesting and more complicated is going on here
Paul Romer
#9. Modern liberalism has many roots. One of the most important is the ideas of a man described by an American critic as 'his satanic free-trade majesty John Stuart Mill' and revered by others.
Alan Ryan
#10. There is this idea of history as something you make, as a meaningful narrative with a beginning and an end, the end being a utopia of happiness that we'll reach through socialism or free trade or democracy, and then it will all be wonderful.
Pankaj Mishra
#11. And for all concerned there was a deepening anger that under the cloak of defending the sacred tenet of "free trade," the United States continued to finance and do business with both sides in the conflict, growing ever richer while Europe bled.
Scott Anderson
#13. You do not need to be in the single market we do not need that we are the word's fifth biggest economy. Most economies can agree free trade deals within two years the EU is taking 10 years or never at all, why?
Andrea Leadsom
#14. The progressive movement against the war of occupation in Iraq is a reason for hope, as is resistance to free trade agreements in Latin America. Those are moments that we have to celebrate: that people still find the resolve and energy to resist.
Danny Glover
#15. I think bolstering free trade is a boon to the dollar.
Carly Fiorina
#16. I favor free trade in drugs for the same reason the Founding Fathers favored free trade in ideas: in a free society it is none of the government's business what ideas a man puts into his mind; likewise, it should be none of its business what drugs he puts into his body.
Thomas Szasz
#17. Free trade or the free market means the sovereignty of the consumer.
Faustino Ballve
#18. Any time you read that your government is erecting tariff barriers, supporting threatened industries with subsidies, or interfering in any way with free trade between individuals or nations, you must realize that your standard of living is being lowered as a result.
John Pugsley
#19. It's not a free trade agreement. It has virtually nothing to do with free trade ... It's a protectionist agreement; it's anti free-trade.
Noam Chomsky
#20. Trying to decipher where President Obama really stands on free trade can be like trying to trace the U.S.-Mexico border with a Google map. There are words, and there are actions - but there is mostly that long squiggly line in between.
Nina Easton
#21. The ability to provide choices and the right to make choices that prove not detrimental, are the fundamental ingredients of free trade and independence.
John Truman Stoddert
#22. Public protests against globalization - protests that occur by and large in the prosperous West - denounce free trade and the mobility of capital as instruments of exploitation and oppression.
Thomas Woods
#23. When America closes its doors, so does everybody else. We are the primary engine of growth in the world and we are the only beacon of free trade left, and open markets.
Jon Huntsman Jr.
#24. I don't want a Europe that is just a free-trade area attached to NATO. Even less do I want a Europe where it's everyone against everyone, and social and fiscal dumping replaces solidarity.
Segolene Royal
#25. If free trade can really turn all these Third World countries into thriving economies full of entrepreneurs and investors, who's gonna clean the fuckin' toilets around here?
George Carlin
#26. Before we move forward with new efforts to lower the barriers to international free trade, we must review the consequences of the policies of the past and address the problems of the present.
Bob Ney
#28. People say free trade causes dislocation. In actual fact, it's the lowering of trade barriers that causes the dislocation.
P. J. O'Rourke
#29. Manufacturing and commercial monopolies owe their origin not to a tendency imminent in a capitalist economy but to governmental interventionist policy directed against free trade and laissez faire.
Ludwig Von Mises
#30. Free trade is not based on utility but on justice.
Edmund Burke
#31. The pact creating a North American free-trade zone was President Bill Clinton's signature accomplishment; but NAFTA is also the bugaboo of union leaders, grassroots activists and Midwesterners who blame free trade for the factory closings they see in their hometowns.
Nina Easton
#33. I am for joining a free trade zone. The European Union is not such zone, but a zone of raging bureaucracy which stears every hectolitre of wine, and every tone of beef.
Janusz Korwin-Mikke
#34. NAFTA and GATT have about as much to do with free trade as the Patriot Act has to do with liberty.
Michael Badnarik
#35. I am neither a free-trade man, willing to collect all the money we have to raise by direct tax upon the people, nor am I willing to lay a tax simply for protection when the Government does not need the money.
Joseph E. Brown
#36. The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas [and] the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#37. You mentioned the Free Trade Agreement and yes I can't tell you how pleased we are that Morocco is one of the countries that our country is going to begin negotiating a Free Trade Agreement with.
Donald Evans
#38. Business itself is now the most powerful force for change in the world today, richer and faster by far than most governments. And what is it doing with this power? It is using free trade, the most powerful weapon at its disposal, to tighten its grip on the globe.
Anita Roddick
#39. Protectionism does not produce wealth, and free trade and economic openness are ultimately in everyone's interest
Thomas Piketty
#40. This conviction brought me, in the summer of 1978, to the Free Trade Unions - formed by a group of courageous and dedicated people who came out in the defense of the workers' rights and dignity.
Lech Walesa
#41. Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#42. I'm in favor of free trade, but I think if you had to make a choice between having technological progress versus free trade, you had one or the other, you should always pick technological progress. I think it's an incredibly important variable for creating more prosperity.
Peter Thiel
#43. The way - the principle way that human beings had gotten out of extreme poverty is free trade.
Charles Koch
#44. America has an important role to play as the world leader in creating a global order, free trade, free waterways, free commerce, free movement of people. That happens because of U.S. military might.
David Brooks
#45. To open up new markets and create American jobs, we need to make global bilateral free trade agreements a priority as they were under the Clinton administration.
Mark McKinnon
#46. Free trade creates jobs and prosperity in the Netherlands at the port of Rotterdam or the airport at Schiphol.
Mark Rutte
#47. The Turkish, Arab and Chinese nationalists who built new nation-states out of the ruins of old empires scorned their old, decrepit rulers as much as they did the foreign imperialists who imposed free trade through gunboats.
Pankaj Mishra
#49. I've always considered making it legal for Americans to import their prescription drugs a free-trade issue. Imports create competition and keep domestic industry more responsive to consumers.
Chuck Grassley
#51. By outlawing Solidarity, a free trade organization to which an overwhelming majority of Polish workers and farmers belong, they have made it clear that they never had any intention of restoring one of the most elemental human rights the right to belong to a free trade union.
Ronald Reagan
#52. 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
#53. The message is NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) is there. NAFTA has helped both our countries enormously. We live up to the terms of NAFTA. We ask you, our best friend and most important trading partner to do the same thing.
Anne McLellan
#54. Free trade will go a long way toward alleviating poverty in Central America. Yet trade alone is not enough.
Oscar Arias
#55. Basically, the myth is that America has been founded on the free market; the government has done very little; it has thrived under free trade. But actually, if you look at the history, this is actually the country that has succeeded most with protectionist policies.
Ha-Joon Chang
#56. Our free trade plan is quite simple. We say that every [citizen] shall have the right to buy whatever he wants, wherever he wants, at his own good pleasure, without restriction or discouragement from the state.
Winston Churchill
#57. To hear the Japanese plead for free trade is like hearing the word love on the lips of a harlot.
Lane Kirkland
#58. Sanctions are not diplomacy. They are a precursor to war and an embarrassment to a country that pays lip service to free trade.
Ron Paul
#59. As the Prussian historian Treitschke later complained, the proponents of free trade in Hamburg had 'in German fashion made out of necessity not just a virtue but a theory'.
Richard J. Evans
#60. We've been the foolish country for so long with this free trade, but it's not free trade because it's - you know, just doesn't work. I mean, it's not working. You look at the deficits we have.
Donald Trump
#61. 'Capitalism' is a dirty word for many intellectuals, but there are a number of studies showing that open economies and free trade are negatively correlated with genocide and war.
Steven Pinker
#62. If you want India to lower tariffs and facilitate more free trade, then I think Indian producers also have a right to enter the European market.
Vijay Mallya
#63. Negotiating sugar trade in bilateral free trade agreements is a recipe for disaster for the U.S. sugar industry, and it is unnecessary.
Kent Conrad
#64. Pakistan is the first South Asian country to sign a free trade agreement and currency swap agreement with China.
Li Keqiang
#65. Let's start getting some free trade agreements started as soon as we can. We need to get on with it; we need to get a grip and make progress.
Theresa May
#66. Because of the Korean free trade agreement, South Koreans who want Oregon blueberries are gonna see their prices go down because we will be getting rid of a 45 percent tariff on this Oregon product.
Ron Wyden
#67. As it is, the grotesque distortions of the global market mean that for every dollar the West dispatches to Africa in the form of aid, two dollars are clawed back through subsidies and tariff barriers: a monumental rip-off by the rich as they instruct the poor to accept 'free' trade or else.
Jonathan Dimbleby
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. The whole idea of having a free trade area when you have gyrating exchange rates doesn't make sense at all. It just spoils the effect of any kind of free trade agreement.
Robert Mundell
#71. In a system of free trade and free markets poor countries - and poor people - are not poor because others are rich. Indeed, if others became less rich the poor would in all probability become still poorer.
Margaret Thatcher
#72. I believe in free trade. I don't support regulating trade prices between different regions. Our point of view is we don't want trade barriers between different countries.
Hans Vestberg
#73. Britain, the first industrial nation, had offered the world a remarkable public experiment in liberal, capitalist democracy whose success was premised upon free trade and world peace. Tuesday, 4 August 1914 brought that experiment to an abrupt halt.
Kenneth O. Morgan
#74. If we vote to Leave and take back control, all sorts of opportunities open up. Including doing new free trade deals around the world, restoring Britain's seat on all sorts of international bodies, restoring health to our democracy and belief to our democracy.
Boris Johnson
#75. The free trade movement in the middle of the last century represents the first conscious recognition of these new circumstances and of the necessity to adapt to them.
Christian Lous Lange
#76. And you can't have a prosperous economy when the government is way overspending, raising tax rates, printing too much money, over regulating and restricting free trade. It just can't be done.
Arthur Laffer
#77. It's very hard to find things that rhyme with North American Free Trade Agreement.
Chris Martin
#78. By adopting the 'free trade,' or British, system, we place ourselves side by side with the men who have ruined Ireland and India, and are now poisoning and enslaving the Chinese people.
Henry Charles Carey
#79. I think that the important point is we've got to have a president who understands the benefits of free trade but also is going to enforce unfair trade agreements and is going to stand up to other countries.
Barack Obama
#80. Private property and free trade stand on exactly the same footing, both being essential and indivisible parts of liberty, both depending upon rights, which no body of men, whether called governments or anything else, can justly take from the individual.
Auberon Herbert
#81. Uruguay is one of the biggest producers of software. We are breaking with the neoliberal model. We do not believe in free trade.
Hugo Chavez
#82. The main concept is that of an international solidarity expressed in practice through worldwide division of labor: free trade is the principal point in the program of internationalism.
Christian Lous Lange
#84. The orthodox doctrines of economics which were dominant in the last quarter of the nineteenth century had a clear message. They supported laisser faire, free trade, the gold standard, and the universally advantageous effects of the pursuit of profit by competitive private enterprise.
Joan Robinson
#85. I would love to persuade Christopher Bailey to get even just a section of Burberry that's, like, organic or free trade. I love him, he's a very good person and an amazing designer, and I have a lot of respect and time for him.
Emma Watson
#86. I'm not opposed to free trade if it's fair trade. But I am opposed to bad trade deals.
Martin O'Malley
#87. The assertion that everyone benefits simultaneously from free trade is simply incorrect.
Kenneth Rogoff
#88. When you're in an economic downturn, what you want is to create jobs and economic growth. And the recipe isn't Republican or Democrat. It's low taxes, low spending, less regulation, free trade.
Nancy Pfotenhauer
#89. I love free trade, but we need great leadership to have real free trade. And we don't have good leadership. We have leadership that doesn't know what it's doing.
Donald Trump
#90. There was free trade in Africa. There was free enterprise in Africa before the colonialists came.
George Ayittey
#91. I'm not against free trade but I'm against free trade deals that are negotiated badly, that actually compromise jobs, manufacturing jobs, compromise the national interest.
Nick Xenophon
#92. We've advanced in the construction of a true free-trade area across South America ... What's needed now is less rhetoric and more action.
Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva
#93. Free trade is the serial killer of American manufacturing and the Trojan Horse of World Government. It is the primrose path to the loss of economic independence and national sovereignty. Free trade is a bright shining lie.
Pat Buchanan
#94. Too many countries that do not play by the free trade rules of the World Trade Organization - including, notably mercantilist China and monopolist Saudi Arabia - have been allowed in, to the detriment of both the WTO and the liberal trading environment it is supposed to sponsor.
Frank Gaffney
#95. Few countries have become rich through free-trade, free-market policies, and few ever will.
Ha-Joon Chang
#96. I think it is one of the fundamentals, not only of the European Union but also of free trade, that competition is fair.
Margrethe Vestager
#97. Globalization and free trade do spur economic growth, and they lead to lower prices on many goods.
Robert Reich
#98. 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
#99. Marx's critique of free markets and free trade can shed as much devastating light on our own actually existing capitalism as it did for the capitalism of Marx's own time and place.
David Harvey
#100. Not only does free trade have nothing to do with democracy, but in most cases throughout history the two have been inimical. Free trade prospered only at the expense of democracy and the freedom of the majority.
Michael Hogan
