In light of the seemingly constant barrage of attacks on our free-market system, I’ve decided to put together a list of quotes that revolve around the true ideas shared by our founding fathers.
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Ultimate Free Market Quotes List
# A government which robs Peter to pay Paul, can always count on the support of Paul. – George Bernard Shaw
# Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. – P.J. O’Rourke
# There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him. – Robert Heinlein
# When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators. – P.J. O’Rourke
# A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away. – Barry Goldwater (1964)
# There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as “caring” and “sensitive” because he wants to expand the government’s charitable programs is merely saying that he’s willing to try to do good with other people’s money. Well, who isn’t? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he’ll do good with his own money – if a gun is held to his head. – P.J. O’Rourke
# If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else’s expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves. – Thomas Sowell (1992)
# America’s abundance was not created by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. – Ayn Rand
# When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both. – James Dale Davidson, National Taxpayers Union
# 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 Mises,
# Tariffs, quotas and other import restrictions protect the business of the rich at the expense of high cost of living for the poor. Their intent is to deprive you of the right to choose, and to force you to buy the high-priced inferior products of politically favored companies. – Alan Burris, “A Liberty Primer”
# If we were directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we would soon want for bread. – Thomas Jefferson
# The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it. – Harry Browne
# The “private sector” of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and…the “public sector” is, in fact, the coercive sector. – Henry Hazlitt
# The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people’s money away quietly, and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly. – Thomas Sowell
# Economic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics. – Ludwig von Mises
# Capitalism has created the highest standard of living ever known on earth. The evidence is incontrovertible. The contrast between West and East Berlin is the latest demonstration, like a laboratory experiment for all to see. Yet those who are loudest in proclaiming their desire to eliminate poverty are loudest in denouncing capitalism. Man’s well-being is not their goal. – Ayn Rand, Theory and Practice
# It is a free market that makes monopolies impossible. – Ayn Rand
# Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities. – Robert Nozick, Harvard philosopher
# There are many farm handouts; but let’s call them what they really are: a form of legalized theft. Essentially, a congressman tells his farm constituency, “Vote for me. I’ll use my office to take another American’s money and give it to you.” – Walter Williams, economist and syndicated columnist
# National Health Insurance means combining the efficiency of the Postal Service with the compassion of the I.R.S. … and the cost accounting of the Pentagon. – Louis Sullivan/Connie Horner quoted by Novak
# To tax the larger incomes at a higher percentage than the smaller, is to lay a tax on industry and economy; to impose a penalty on people for having worked harder and saved more than their neighbors. – John Stuart Mill
# Everyone wants to live at the expense of the State. They forget that the State lives at the expense of everyone. – Frédéric Bastiat
# The American Dream was not about government’s taking huge sums of money (under the label of “taxation”) from citizens by force. The American Dream was about individualism and the opportunity to achieve success without interference from others. – Robert Ringer
# People who create things nowadays can expect to be prosecuted by highly moralistic people who are incapable of creating anything. There is no way to measure the chilling effect on innovation that results from the threats of taxation, regulation and prosecution against anything that succeeds. We’ll never know how many ideas our government has aborted in the name protecting us. – Joseph Sobran May 13, 1998 (commenting on US vs Microsoft)
# Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin. Bankruptcies and losses concentrate the mind on prudent behavior. – Allan H. Meltzer
# Taxation with representation ain’t so hot either. – Gerald Barzan
# A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government. – Thomas Jefferson (1801)
# The power to tax is the power to destroy. – John Marshall
# [On ancient Athens]: In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again. – Edward Gibbon
# Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. – C. S. Lewis
# A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. – Alexander Tytler
# A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money. – G. Gordon Liddy
# It is sobering to reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence. – Charles A. Beard
# No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words “no” and “not” employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights. – Edmund A. Opitz
# The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin. – Mark Twain
# What this country needs are more unemployed politicians. – Edward Langley
# Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt. – Herbert Hoover
# Government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. – Henry David Thoreau
# Governments harangue about deficits to get more revenue so they can spend more. – Allan H. Meltzer (1993)
# The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another. – Milton Friedman
# If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free. – P.J. O’Rourke (1993)
# The Government is like a baby’s alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other. – Ronald Reagan
# The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery. – Winston Churchill
# There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences. – P.J. O’Rourke (1993)
# Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. – Ronald Reagan (1986)
# I was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism by its hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism by its literature. – Sidney Hook
