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. I think that the Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government.
Milton Friedman
#3. I would ask: Given the nature of free-market capitalism - where the rule is to rise to the top at all costs - is it possible to have a financial industry hero? And by the way, this is not a pop-culture trend we're talking about. There aren't many financial heroes in literature, theater or cinema.
Martin Scorsese
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Arguing that the only problem with a free market is lack of competition, is like arguing that that the only problem with prostitution is that there aren't enough pimps.
Quentin R. Bufogle
#9. The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it.
Harry Browne
#10. The United States can no longer rely upon foreign nations such as China to bail us out of our economic irresponsibility. We must live within our means and implement creative, free-market solutions to put Americans back in jobs and to create economic opportunities.
Pete Sessions
#11. The 'free market' is the product of laws and rules continuously emanating from legislatures, executive departments, and courts.
Robert Reich
#12. 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.
#13. The Republican Party and the conservative free market movement have been presidentially focused for too long.
Grover Norquist
#14. I'd like to talk about free markets. Information in the computer age is the last genuine free market left on earth except those free markets where indigenous people are still surviving. And that's basically becoming limited.
Russell Means
#15. From Chile to China to Iraq, torture has been a silent partner in the global free-market crusade.
Naomi Klein
#16. 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
#17. Capitalism is not a form of government. Capitalism is a symptom of freedom. It is the result of individual rights, which include property rights.
A.E. Samaan
#18. What private property does is connect effort to reward, creating an incentive for people to produce for more. Then, if there's a free market, people will trade their surpluses to others for the things they lack. Mutual exchange for mutual benefit makes the community richer.
John Stossel
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. As we consider the fast pace of scientific and technological progress in our modern world, we must not lose our moral compass and give way to 'free market eugenics'.
Sam Brownback
#22. Now a great debate has been born. The thesis is Democratic Socialism. The antithesis is free-market capitalism. The Obama Democrats have posed the challenge. It is now up to the Republicans to pick it up and fight along these lines.
Dick Morris
#23. 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
#24. Trade and money, which go together in a stream of energy, inevitably wash away the enclosing walls of a society of status.
Isabel Paterson
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. While Argentina, Brazil, and Chile - what in textbooks used to be called the ABC countries - seem settled into democratic politics and free market economics, the Andean countries are in disarray.
Elliott Abrams
#29. 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
#30. In response to a suggestion that total free trade would end in cheaper foreign products flooding the market and causing unemployment.
Milton Friedman
#31. 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
#32. The good news is, Americans know firsthand the benefits of a free market - more choices, lower prices, higher quality - and there is no reason why we cannot help them see these same benefits in health care.
John Shadegg
#33. Secondly, as a result of this political favoritism, the FDA has become a primary factor in that formula whereby cartel-oriented companies in the food and drug industry are able to use the police powers of government to harass or destroy their free-market competitors.
G. Edward Griffin
#34. 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
#35. The air we breathe is still free, but for how much time. I believe someone is busy patenting it to start selling it for profit
Bangambiki Habyarimana
#36. 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
#37. The reaper can be produced only in countries where labor receives a high reward, where farmers own their own acres without fear of being despoiled by invading armies, where average of intelligence is as high in the country as in the city.
Herbert Newton Casson
#38. The free market is not a god; we have to do everything we can to make the market competitive.
Michael Gove
#40. 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.
#41. A depression is a large-scale decline in production and trade ... there is nothing in the nature of a free-market economy to cause such an event.
Nathaniel Branden
#42. 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
#43. Servile labour disappeared because it could not stand the competition of free labour; its un-profitability sealed its doom in the market economy.
Ludwig Von Mises
#44. The free market allowed shock jocks to flourish, and millions of listeners apparently enjoyed the rant.
Christine Pelosi
#45. The wonder of a free-market society is that we can all do our best to package our message in an entertaining fashion and present it - and then everybody votes with their footsteps.
Max Lucado
#46. We are not for making shoes, so the shoemakers can have jobs, but so we can wear the shoes.
Janusz Korwin-Mikke
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#52. I had to abandon free market principles in order to save the free market system.
George W. Bush
#53. I think people loosely use the term 'free speech.' If the market wants to be such that people don't want to watch someone, so be it.
Greta Van Susteren
#54. International trade in chemical products is not free. . . . Joint control of the market became the general rule; free competition, the exception.
George W. Stocking
#55. We know that in our free market economy some will prosper more than others. What we don't accept is the idea that some folks won't even get a chance.
Julian Castro
#56. 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
#57. Scratch the surface at conservative think tanks and universities that house free-market economists, and it's not hard to find proponents of a carbon tax.
Nina Easton
#58. The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians.
Dwayne Andreas
#59. Though many intellectuals, following in the footsteps of Saints Augustine and Jerome, hold business people in contempt for their selfishness and greed, in fact a free market puts a premium on empathy.
Steven Pinker
#60. 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
#61. Free trade or the free market means the sovereignty of the consumer.
Faustino Ballve
#62. The challenge as we saw in the Nigerian project was to restructure the economy decisively in the direction of a modern free market as an appropriate environment for cultivation of freedom and democracy and the natural emergence of a new social order.
Ibrahim Babangida
#63. The Western societies which espouse free market capitalism survive by the pursuit of greed and, in their own way, like Communism, throw into leadership men and women (mostly men) who know how to gain, exert and manipulate power.
Davis McCaughey
#64. The IPL, involving the socialist principle of a salary cap and the protectionist mechanism of quotas, is not perhaps the best example of a market left flourishingly to its own devices and dynamics.
Gideon Haigh
#65. Once I really got into securities fraud prosecutions, I came to realize how central they were to the maintenance of a free market and how, in many ways, they are far more important to the welfare of our society than many of the more sensational criminal cases that one hears about.
Jed S. Rakoff
#66. The existence of a free market does not of course eliminate the need for government. On the contrary, government is essential both as a forum for determining the "rule of the game" and as an umpire to interpret and enforce the rules decided on.
Milton Friedman
#67. 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
#68. Depressions and mass unemployment are not caused by the free market but by government interference in the economy.
Ludwig Von Mises
#69. We know that government intervention in the free market, and Argentine history has shown this, absolutely ends in a boomerang.
Daniel Morgan
#70. I went out as a free agent in Boston and had a great year and I priced myself out of there market, at the time.
Johnny Damon
#71. Once an activity has been socialized, it is impossible to point out, by concrete example, how men in a free market could better conduct it. How, for instance, can one compare a socialized post office with private postal delivery when the latter has been outlawed?
Leonard Read
#72. 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
#73. I reject the insurance model. I think we should have a free-market approach to healthcare.
Gary Johnson
#74. Beginning with the stimulus, Obama has repeatedly inserted the government into the free market for political reasons - and with disastrous results.
Reince Priebus
#75. Global warming is a fact. Now it's up to liberals to make it a reality. Hence there is crucial importance in preventing powerful, greedy free market forces from getting in the way of worsening storms and rising sea levels. The Kyoto Accord is a good first step.
P. J. O'Rourke
#76. 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
#77. The fact is Qatar, Etihad, Emirates, Singapore, Garuda, all of the three Chinese airlines, Air New Zealand - the fact is that international aviation relies very much upon agreements between nation-states, and it is not an area in which you have free market operations.
Anthony Albanese
#78. 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
#79. 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
#81. 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
#82. The public has been sold a bill of goods about the free market being a panacea for mankind.
Tom Scholz
#83. Every time you cut programs, you take away a person who has a vested interest in high taxes and you put him on the tax rolls and make him a taxpayer. A farmer on subsidies is part welfare bum, whereas a free-market farmer is a small businessman with a gun.
Grover Norquist
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. One of O'Reilly's advantages is that we have a network of thousands of user groups to whom we give free books, to whom we advertise our products, and they spread the word. If you don't have that database, it's hard to get the attention of the market.
Tim O'Reilly
#87. 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
#88. Basically, on the question of Europe, I want to see a social Europe, a cohesive Europe, a coherent Europe, not a free market Europe.
Jeremy Corbyn
#89. 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
#90. 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.
#91. The death of the MG marks the end of one of the most perfect products of free enterprise, born out of the voracious will to succeed of one man and the burgeoning market for middle-class status symbols. The car first appeared as a souped-up Morris Oxford in 1923 when it won the Land's End Rally.
Nick Davies
#92. There can never be such a thing as a free market, because it is human nature to cheat, monopolize, and buy off others so as to corner the market.
Jane Smiley
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. Most larger companies now see that for the market to grow, Web infrastructure must be royalty-free.
Tim Berners-Lee
#96. We all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. When you have a perfect free market, it's difficult to predict the future. But when you have a market that is disturbed by government manipulations and money-printing, it's impossible to make any predictions.
Marc Faber
#100. Free markets. What does this system mean? The answer is simple: it is the market economy, it is the system in which the cooperation of individuals in the social division of labor is achieved by the market.
Ludwig Von Mises