Quotes About Laissez Faire

#1. Unrestricted laissez faire capitalism allocates resources in a most efficient way to satisfy human wants without regard to the rationality or morality of those desires.

Jerry Pournelle

#2. Political economy is the science of free society. Its theory and its history alike establish this position. Its fundamental maxims, Laissez-faire and 'Pas trop gouverner' are at war with all kinds of slavery, for they in fact assert that individuals and peoples prosper most when governed least.

George Fitzhugh

#3. Her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#4. no man is free who is not a master of himself, that the more liberties we enjoy, the more discipline we need.46 Laissez-faire,

Abraham Joshua Heschel

#5. In reality, government subsidized railroad construction, maintained high protective tariffs and a tight money supply, used its power to crush strikes, and in other ways supported the nation's most powerful economic interests. But the laissez-faire myth still framed political debate. The

Steven J. Diner

#6. Laissez faire does not mean: let soulless mechanical forces operate. It means: let individuals choose how they want to cooperate in the social division of labor and let them determine what the entrepreneurs should produce.

Ludwig Von Mises

#7. In stark contrast with the views of the Greek philosophers and with those of the rest of western intellectuals to the present day, Chinese Taoist thought always defended individual liberty and laissez-faire while attacking the systematic and coercive use of violence typical of government.

Jesus Huerta De Soto

#8. That is the flip side, you see, to laissez-faire parenting. It succeeds or not, throughout the animal kingdom as it does with humans, in direct relationship to the strength of the offspring. Some of us don't need very much. Some of us need a lot.

Cynthia Rogers Parks

#9. I am now a fundamentalist American; give me time and I will tell you why individualism, laissez-faire and the slightly restrained anarchy of capitalism offer the best opportunities for the development of the human spirit.

Rose Wilder Lane

#10. In a laissez-faire society, there could exist no public institution with the power to forcefully protect people from themselves. From other people (criminals), yes. From one's own self, no.

Karl Hess

#11. With laissez-faire and price atomic, Ecology's Uneconomic, But with another kind of logic Economy's Unecologic.

Kenneth E. Boulding

#12. Laissez-faire, supply and demand-one begins to be weary of all that. Leave all to egotism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of applause-it is the gospel of despair.

Thomas Carlyle

#13. Laissez Faire, laissez passer. Let it be, let it pass. The phrase is not readily translatable. It was widely used by the Physiocrats in urging freedom from government interference and was adopted by Adam Smith.

Francois Quesnay

#14. I'm pretty earthy; I nursed forever because I liked it and my kids liked it, but at the same time I'm very laissez-faire about stuff like bedtimes and food.

Ana Gasteyer

#15. Thus, the weight of my criticism is directed against the inadequacy of the theoretical foundations of the laissez-faire doctrine upon which I was brought up and for many years I taught

John Maynard Keynes

#16. Whatever the self-righteous excesses of the environmentalist left, it is impossible to be true to traditional conservative values (to say nothing of the Christian faith conservatives like me profess) and hold laissez faire attitudes about the use and abuse of the natural world.

Rod Dreher

#17. Laissez-faire, says the professor, when it often means bind and gag that the strongest may work his will. It is a plea for the survival of the fittest - for the strongest male to take possession of the herd by a process of extermination.

Theodore Roosevelt

#18. The scope of modern government in what it can and ought to accomplish for its people has been widened far beyond the principles laid down by the old "laissez faire" school of political rights, and the widening has met popular approval.

William Howard Taft

#19. My god has always been a laissez-faire deity, giving you the initial goods and sending you on to make your way.

Jane Hamilton

#20. The man who accepts the laissez-faire doctrine would allow his garden to grow wild so that roses might fight it out with the weeds and the fittest might survive.

John Ruskin

#21. Throughout the 19th century, when there was a laissez-faire mentality and insufficient regulation, you had one crisis after another. Each crisis brought about some reform. That is how central banking developed.

George Soros

#22. So-called Individualism is the social and economic laissez-faire: the exploitation of the masses by the classes by means of legal trickery, spiritual debasement and systematic indoctrination of the servile spirit, which process is known as 'education'.

Emma Goldman

#23. Laissez faire (in its full true meaning) opens the way to the realization of the noble dreams of socialism.

Henry George

#24. Laissez Faire was very good sauce for the goose, labor, but was very poor sauce for the gander, capital.

Benjamin Tucker

#25. Here we are, then, once more back at the old doctrine - Laissez faire. Let us translate it into blunt English, and it will read, Mind your own business. It is nothing but the doctrine of liberty. Let every man be happy in his own way.

William Graham Sumner

#26. He is certainly not a good citizen who does not wish to promote, by every means in his power, the welfare of the whole society of his fellow citizens." That is Adam Smith talking, the apostle of laissez-faire.

Charles Murray

#27. It's Laissez-Faire Until You Get In Deep Shit

Michael Lewis

#28. What I wish I had, is that I wish I was a little more Greek, in that I wish I could lose my North American driven attitude and that I could be a little bit more poetic and laissez faire.

Nia Vardalos

#29. When laissez-faire creates instability, the move to a freer market can be something less than pure gain.

Robert Kuttner

#30. It is not an accident that developing countries - virtually the whole of East Asia, for example - view the role of the state in a far more interventionist way than does the Anglo-Saxon world. Laissez-faire and free markets are the favoured means of the powerful and privileged.

Martin Jacques

#31. Just as the left has to be more willing to question 'Government knows best,' the right has to rethink its laissez-faire attitude toward government.

Jack Kemp

#32. We must abandon definitely the laissez-faire theory of political economy, and fearlessly champion a system of increased Governmental control, paying no heed to the cries of the worthy people who denounce this as Socialistic.

Theodore Roosevelt

#33. The treasury could fill old bottles with banknotes and bury them..and leave it to private enterprises on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again.

John Maynard Keynes

#34. The proper governmental policy in a depression is strict laissez-faire, including stringent budget slashing, and coupled perhaps with positive encouragement for credit contraction.

Murray Rothbard

#35. Laissez-faire is finished. The all-powerful market that always knows best is finished.

Nicolas Sarkozy

#36. The principle of laissez-faire may be safely trusted to in some things but in many more it is wholly inapplicable; and to appeal to it on all occasions savors more of the policy of a parrot than of a statesman or a philosopher.

John Ramsay McCulloch

#37. What's the biggest commercial for aggression, sexuality and materialism? What gets pumped into these kids' heads? Taking someone else's girl, which is so laissez-faire in hip-hop, will get you killed in the streets, but it doesn't seem to be an issue when you hear it on the radio.

Lupe Fiasco

#38. Global laissez-faire is not a conspiracy of corporate America. It is a tragedy - one of several that have occurred in the twentieth century - in which an hubristic ideology runs aground on enduring human needs that it has failed to comprehend.

John Gray

#39. This is the East Coast, boy. I know they're pretty laissez-faire about dress in your neck of the woods, but back here 52. they don't let you run around in your bathing suit all year long.
Blacks and blues, that's the ticket, blacks and blues ... (Bunny Corcoran to Richard Papen)

Donna Tartt

#40. Agile does not mean laissez-faire, flexibility and freedom are based on the well-defined principles.

Pearl Zhu

#41. [I am against] the Treaty of Rome which entrenches laissez faire as its philosophy and chooses bureaucracy as its administrative method.

Tony Benn

#42. I'm fine with whatever comes my way, and whatever doesn't come my way I'm fine with too. I have a very laissez-faire attitude with the whole thing.

Alice Sebold

#43. If one rejects laissez faire on account of mans fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action.

Ludwig Von Mises

#44. I am opposed to all forms of control. I am for an absolute, laissez-faire, free, unregulated economy.

Ayn Rand

#45. I clearly believe a lot more than some of my coalition colleagues - Tories - in redistribution and using the tax system for that purpose. I also believe in the government having an active role in the economy, which is having an industrial strategy. I'm not a believer in laissez-faire.

Vince Cable

#46. My parents couldn't be looser. It was the ultimate laissez faire upbringing.

Charlie Trotter

#47. 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

#48. The laissez-faire argument relies on the same tacit appeal to perfection as does communism.

George Soros

#49. Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships.

Ayn Rand

#50. The criminal excesses of unlimited capitalistic liberty had soon been checked thanks to the unlimited liberty of the press.

Salvador De Madariaga

#51. Someone asked me the other day if I believe in conspiracies. Well, sure. Here's one. It is called the political system. It is nothing if not a giant conspiracy to rob, trick and subjugate the population.

Jeffrey Tucker

#52. Poverty can be brought about by law; it cannot be forbidden by law.

Isabel Paterson

#53. All atheists must examine the Non Aggression Principle.

Stefan Molyneux

#54. Government could avoid having opinions about so many things if it would quit subsidizing so many things.

George F. Will

#55. The more laws and restrictions there are,
The poorer people become.
...
The more rules and regulations,
The more thieves and robbers.

Lao-Tzu

#56. The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

H.L. Mencken

#57. The military state is the final form to which every planned economy tends rapidly.

Isabel Paterson

#58. The profit of the one is the profit of the other.

Frederic Bastiat

#59. 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

#60. Here's something I still can't get over. Amazes and thrills me every time. I'm sitting here and want a certain book. So I search, click, and then I have the book. Every time, my heart does a little leap of joy. What a beautiful world the market is making.

Jeffrey Tucker

#61. The way to a landowner's heart was to tax gently.

Peter Heather

#62. There are two principles between which there can be no compromise - liberty and coercion.

Frederic Bastiat

#63. He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.

Ludwig Von Mises

#64. People who can't imagine order without imposition always end up favoring power over liberty.

Jeffrey Tucker

#65. What does it matter what people do? At the end of the day we're all dead.

Kate Atkinson

#66. Private property is redundant. "Public property" is an oxymoron. All legit property is private. If property isn't private it's stolen.

Gustave De Molinari

#67. A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment ... is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule.

Ayn Rand

#68. Democracy without respect for individual rights sucks. It's just ganging up against the weird kid, and I'm always the weird kid.

Penn Jillette

#69. Have you ever noticed how statists are constantly "reforming" their own handiwork? Education reform. Health-care reform. Welfare reform. Tax reform. The very fact they're always busy "reforming" is an implicit admission that they didn't get it right the first 50 times.

Lawrence W. Reed

#70. No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.

Ludwig Von Mises

#71. The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat.

George Soros

#72. The law is guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish.

Frederic Bastiat