Quotes About Government Intervention

#1. A Day never passes without some ardent reformer or group of reformers suggesting some new government intervention, some new statist scheme to fill some alleged 'need' or relieve some alleged distress.

Henry Hazlitt

#2. 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

#3. The FHA's success provides strong evidence that government can and should play a role in the nation's mortgage finance system. It also demonstrates that although government intervention in the economy during the Great Recession was messy, things would have been a lot messier without it.

Mark Zandi

#4. I'm a little embarrassed about how long it took me to see the folly of most government intervention. It was probably 15 years before I really woke up to the fact that almost everything government attempts to do, it makes worse.

John Stossel

#5. A nanny state is hostile to liberty. Any attempt to institute or continue it should be opposed, root and branch. Government intervention is never the solution; it is always part of the problem.

Laurence M. Vance

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. After the risky mortgage-lending practices fostered by government intervention led to massive defaults and foreclosures that caused financial institutions to collapse or be bailed out, Congressman Frank changed his tune completely.

Thomas Sowell

#9. (Economist Robert Higgs wrote a book about this phenomenon titled Crisis and Leviathan, in which he argues that government intervention inevitably creates future problems, which results in the government's intervening even more in an attempt to correct them.)

Glenn Beck

#10. Nothing rectifies out-of-control market failures like a healthy dose of
government intervention and mountains of bureaucracy.

George Carlin

#11. There is no way to stabilize the markets other than through government intervention.

Henry Paulson

#12. It has become fashionable to rail against government intervention in the economy, and the FHA is a favorite example by those trying to show the government's overreach. In reality, the FHA shows how government action during the Great Recession forestalled a much worse economic fate.

Mark Zandi

#13. Contrary to the vision of the left, it was the free market which produced affordable housing - before government intervention made housing unaffordable.

Thomas Sowell

#14. The Libertarian position on the freedom of speech is a strong support of freedom of speech, and we oppose government intervention in controlling what is or is not moral.

Michael Badnarik

#15. Free enterprise, [is] a term that refers, in practice, to a system of public subsidy and private profit, with massive government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state for the rich.

Noam Chomsky

#16. What would annoy the most people most often? That is the true left-wing test of government intervention.

P. J. O'Rourke

#17. The big question about the American depression is not whether war with Germany and Japan ended it. It is why the Depression lasted until that war. From 1929 to 1940, from Hoover to Roosevelt, government intervention helped to make the Depression Great.

Amity Shlaes

#18. Every government intervention [in the marketplace] creates unintended consequences, which lead to calls for further government interventions ...

Ludwig Von Mises

#19. Capitalism cannot cause a financial crisis because capitalism is about markets constantly correcting errors. It is government intervention that can and often does cause crises,

John Tamny

#20. , I believe in some type of free market system. I just don't think you'll find an example of one completely free from government intervention.

Kenneth Eade

#21. While admirers of capitalism, we also to a certain extent believe it has limitations that require government intervention in markets to make them work.

Janet Yellen

#22. When government takes away options, it is bound to make some people worse off, even with intrinsicallly good intentions behind that government intervention.

Thomas Sowell

#23. Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges, such as franchises or subsidies, which closed the entry of competitors into a given field, by legislative action.

Ayn Rand

#24. For the postwar peace, he preferred to minimize direct government intervention and manipulate the economy through fiscal and other incentives.

Tony Judt

#25. We know that government intervention in the free market, and Argentine history has shown this, absolutely ends in a boomerang.

Daniel Morgan

#26. Government intervention is not solving the problems, and in fact the governments around the world that are intervening the most in their economies are struggling more.

Oliver DeMille

#27. It's often difficult for conservatives to separate overall government intervention from a question as simple as the census.

Patrick McHenry

#28. What I object to the current government intervention in so-called 'solving the crisis', they haven't solved anything. They've just postponed it.

Marc Faber

#29. Whether we like it or not, government intervention in the face of surplus is here to stay.

Benjamin Graham

#30. We are watching industries crumble, Wall Street firms disappear, unemployment spike, and unprecedented government intervention. And our designated opinion leaders want to know: Is Obama up this week? Is he down? And is his leadership style more like Bill Clinton's, or Abraham Lincoln's?

Thomas Frank

#31. We are too solicitous for government intervention, on the theory, first, that the people themselves are helpless, and second, that the Government has superior capacity for action. Often times both of these conclusions are wrong.

Calvin Coolidge

#32. This is not about abortion or the antics. This is about pro choice versus anti-choice and government intervention in a woman's personal decisions about her life.

Kathleen Turner

#33. We need better options for securing the Internet. Instead of looking primarily for top-down government intervention, we can enlist the operators and users themselves.

Jonathan Zittrain

#34. No diplomatic intervention will ever be made by any government that I lead in support of any individual terrorist's life. We have only indicated in the past, and will maintain a policy in the future, of intervening diplomatically in support of Australian nationals who face capital sentences abroad.

Kevin Rudd

#35. If you want government to intervene domestically, you're a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you're a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate. If you don't want government to intervene anywhere, you're an extremist.

Joseph Sobran

#36. Throughout American history many of our social gains and much of our progress toward democracy were made possible by the active intervention of the federal government.

Harold Washington

#37. That is the trick of good government. To make folk desire to live in such a way that there is no need for its intervention.

Robin Hobb

#38. In no way have we contemplated the intervention of the army in tasks that belong to police at the different levels of government. What is contemplated .. is support from the army in these tasks but not in direct actions that correspond to municipal, state and federal police.

Ruben Aguilar

#39. The gap between what one knows and what one thinks one knows may be higher in the ranks of the elite. The result is supposedly-clever government interventions, introduced with excessive confidence, leading to disastrous results.

Arnold Kling

#40. In all the more advanced communities the great majority of things are worse done by the intervention of government than the individuals most interested in the matter would do them, or cause them to be done, if left to themselves.

John Stuart Mill

#41. Government interventions create unintended consequences that lead to calls for further intervention, and so on into a destructive spiral of more and more government control.

Ron Paul