Top 100 Quotes About The Free Market
#1. 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.
#2. The free market opens the way for men to operate at their moral best, and all observation confirms that the poor fare better under these circumstances than when the way is closed, as it is under socialism.
Leonard Read
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it.
Harry Browne
#7. The 'free market' is the product of laws and rules continuously emanating from legislatures, executive departments, and courts.
Robert Reich
#8. 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.
#9. 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
#10. The free market is the greatest repository of our freedoms. Economic freedom is the freedom we exercise most often and to the greatest extent.
P. J. O'Rourke
#11. Investing capital in the free market creates innovation, businesses, jobs and economic growth. Investing capital in the government creates more bureaucracy, more paperwork and inefficiency.
Michael Ramirez
#12. It is not uncommon to suppose that the free exchange of property in markets and capitalism are one and the same. They are not. While capitalism operates through the free market, free markets don't require capitalism.
Jeremy Rifkin
#13. 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
#14. For the sake of public discourse, for the demands of the free market, and for the value we place in citizen advocacy, Rush Limbaugh must go.
Christine Pelosi
#15. When people are desperate or wealthy, they turn to socialism; only when they have no other alternative do they embrace the free market. After all, lies about guaranteed security are far more seductive than lectures about personal responsibility.
Ben Shapiro
#16. Those who believe that liberal democracy and the free market can be defended by the force of law and regulation alone, without an internalised sense of duty and morality, are tragically mistaken.
Jonathan Sacks
#17. The policy of letting the free market determine the height of wage rates is the only reasonable and successful full-employment policy.
Ludwig Von Mises
#18. 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
#19. On the free market, everyone earns according to his productive value in satisfying consumer desires. Under statist distribution, everyone earns in proportion to the amount he can plunder from the producers.
Murray Rothbard
#20. The free market is not a god; we have to do everything we can to make the market competitive.
Michael Gove
#21. What polluters do is raise the standards of living for themselves, while lowering the quality of living for everybody else, and they do that by escaping the disciplines of the free market.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
#22. 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
#23. The free market allowed shock jocks to flourish, and millions of listeners apparently enjoyed the rant.
Christine Pelosi
#24. Gold was not selected arbitrarily by governments to be the monetary standard. Gold had developed for many centuries on the free market as the best money; as the commodity providing the most stable and desirable monetary medium.
Murray Rothbard
#25. 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
#26. As Ludwig von Mises conclusively demonstrated in 1912, money does not and cannot originate by order of the State or by some sort of social contract agreed upon by all citizens; it must always originate in the processes of the free market.
Murray Rothbard
#27. I had to abandon free market principles in order to save the free market system.
George W. Bush
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Free trade or the free market means the sovereignty of the consumer.
Faustino Ballve
#31. 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
#32. Depressions and mass unemployment are not caused by the free market but by government interference in the economy.
Ludwig Von Mises
#33. We know that government intervention in the free market, and Argentine history has shown this, absolutely ends in a boomerang.
Daniel Morgan
#34. 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
#35. Beginning with the stimulus, Obama has repeatedly inserted the government into the free market for political reasons - and with disastrous results.
Reince Priebus
#36. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics and some of the editorial pages, I am an ardent believer in the free market.
Barack Obama
#37. 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
#38. Distance does not decide who is your brother and who is not. The church is going to have to become the conscience of the free market if it's to have any meaning in this world - and stop being its apologist.
Bono
#39. 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
#40. The public has been sold a bill of goods about the free market being a panacea for mankind.
Tom Scholz
#41. The free market is not only a more efficient decision maker than even the wisest central planning body, but even more important, the free market keeps economic power widely dispersed.
Milton Friedman
#42. In the strict father model, the "free market" plays a significant, implicit role. The market is a competitive system where the disciplined are rewarded through profit, and the undisciplined (and hence immoral) are punished through poverty. The market is an instrument of morality.
George Lakoff
#43. A fact rarely suspected, let alone understood, is that businessmen are by no means the chief beneficiaries of the free market, private ownership, limited government way of life. Many business ventures fail entirely. Who then are the beneficiaries? The masses!
Leonard Read
#44. People think the free market is a philosophy, they think that it is a creed. It is none of those things. Free market is a bathroom scale, it is a measuring tape, it's simply a measurement.
P. J. O'Rourke
#45. It would appear that, on the level of individual nations and of international relations, the free market is the most efficient instrument for utilizing resources and effectively responding to needs.
Pope John Paul II
#46. The free market promotes self-worth, self-sufficiency, shared values, and honest dealings, which enhance the individual, the family, and the community. It discriminates against no race, religion, or gender.
Mark Levin
#47. The basis of the free market is anytime you can generate revenue or profit, you've created value in excess of the resources you consume in a society. That's probably the most unbiased utility function there is, as opposed to someone's opinion.
Michael J. Saylor
#48. The free market has never worked in agriculture and it never will. The economics of a family farm are very different from a firm's ... the demand for food isn't elastic; people don't eat more just because food is cheap. Even if I go out of business this land will keep producing corn.
Michael Pollan
#49. I don't even consider myself an environmentalist anymore. I'm a free-marketer. I go out into the marketplace and I catch the polluters who are cheating the free market ...
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
#50. Generally speaking, we get the joke. We know that the free market is nonsense. We know that the whole point is to game the system, to beat the market or at least find someone who will pay you a lot of money, 'cause they're convinced that there is a free lunch.
Ron Bloom
#51. I think that, especially among conservatives, there's a clear understanding that there are three legs to the conservative stool. There are the free-market economics conservatives, the social conservatives, and the national-security conservatives.
John Bolton
#52. I know their unstinted devotion to the free-market economy, provided it's their freedom and somebody else's economy.
John Le Carre
#53. The free-market economist Friedrich von Hayek once said that "without a theory, the facts are silent." But for Greenspan, with his theory, the facts became invisible.
Anonymous
#54. Principles-and I have in mind such principles as states' rights or national sovereignty or the free market or pacifism-have a way of drying up while the sap of life goes flowing in another direction.
Max Lerner
#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. Ronald Reagan believes in the free market like some people believe in unicorns.
Barney Frank
#57. Inflation, being a fraudulent invasion of property, could not take place on the free market.
Murray Rothbard
#58. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
Milton Friedman
#59. There are always losers when society evolves. In the free market, these losers are expected and encouraged to retrain and find new ways to survive and thrive.
John McAfee
#60. The broader and more influential organisations of businessmen have acted to undermine the basic foundation of the free market system they purport to represent and defend.
Milton Friedman
#61. When people criticize the free market, they are usually complaining about what happens when you intervene in the free market.
James Cook
#62. The ideal capitalism envisioned by advocates of the free market depends upon social virtues and wise policies that it does not itself generate.
Timothy Snyder
#63. The argument for the free market is a complicated and sophisticated one and depends on demonstration of secondary effects. I have confidence market efficiency will win out.
Milton Friedman
#64. As I get older, everything feels like it's fundamentally connected, and once you've accepted the idea that business is right, and the free market - though there's never really been one - is right, then everything else just follows naturally from there.
Herbert
#65. When the Statist makes a wrong decision, its impact is far-reaching, for he uses the power of government to impose his decision on as many individuals and businesses as possible, which distorts the free market itself.
Mark Levin
#66. 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
#68. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. Health care and education are too important NOT to be left to the free market.
Kevin D. Williamson
#73. 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
#74. Californians devised a system of electricity sales that ignored every dimension of the free market.
P. J. O'Rourke
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. True, the free market ignores the poor precisely as it does not recognize the wealthy - it is 'no respecter of persons'
Leonard Read
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. This is the opposite of the free market.
Bill Maher
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. But in the free market system, you're forced to change.
Roy Romer
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Democracy is acceptable to neo-liberals only in so far as it does not contradict the free market.
Ha-Joon Chang
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. I don't want the technology of the 1950s, but I want the free market of the 1950s.
Peter Schiff
#90. Nations that embrace the free market to the greatest extent prosper the most.
James Cook
#91. The free market economy is supposed to be the only path leading to the happiness of humanity by promoting wealth and prosperity, power and influence of nations.
Omar Bongo
#92. Many people believe that the free market, despite some admitted advantages, is a picture of disorder and chaos. Nothing is "planned," everything is haphazard. Government dictation, on the other hand, seems simple and orderly; decrees are handed down and they are obeyed.
Murray N. Rothbard
#93. You cannot take away freedom to protect it, you cannot destroy the free market to save it, and you cannot uphold freedom of speech by silencing those with whom you disagree. To take rights away to defend them or to spend your way out of debt defies common sense.
Glenn Beck
#94. Yet, while producing increasingly selfish people, the mantra of the Left, and therefore of the universities and the media, has been for generations that capitalism and the free market, not the welfare state, produces selfish people.
Dennis Prager
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. The sad fact is that today most of the heads of big businesses in America have become so confused or intimidated that, so far from carrying the free market to argument to the enemy, they fail to defend themselves adequately even when attacked.
Henry Hazlitt
#98. The Conservative sees in the free market the harmony of interests and rules of cooperation that also underlie the civil society.
Mark Levin
#99. In my experience, economists rarely believe passionately in, or care passionately for, the free market. They are generally more concerned to reveal the market's imperfections, to further their own professional importance.
Terence Kealey
#100. I've read quite a few readers' reviews of my book on Amazon, saying, 'Ah, he criticises the free market, he advocates central planning.' I don't do that for a minute! But this is our black and white, dichotomous way of thinking - which has really been harmful.
Ha-Joon Chang
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