1) "I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in
opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not
making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it." --
Benjamin Franklin
2) "The great danger to the consumer is the monopoly —
whether private or governmental. His most effective protection is free
competition at home and free trade throughout the world. The consumer is
protected from being exploited by one seller by the existence of another seller
from whom he can buy and who is eager to sell to him. Alternative sources of
supply protect the consumer far more effectively than all the Ralph Naders of
the world." -- Milton Friedman
3) "Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as
he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he
uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want
knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of
private property." -- Milton Friedman
4) "A claim for equality of material position can be
met only by a government with totalitarian powers." -- F.A. Hayek
5) "Either immediately or ultimately every dollar of
government spending must be raised through a dollar of taxation. Once we look
at the matter. In this way, the supposed miracles of government spending will
appear in another light." -- Henry Hazlitt
6) "The larger the percentage of the national income
taken by taxes the greater the deterrent to private production and employment.
When the total tax burden grows beyond a bearable size, the problem of devising
taxes that will not discourage and disrupt production becomes insoluble."
-- Henry Hazlitt
7) "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." --
Robert Heinlein
8) "The prudent capitalist will never adventure his
capital... if there exists a state of uncertainty as to whether the government
will repeal tomorrow what it has enacted today." -- William Henry Harrison
9) "Were we directed from Washington
10) "A rising tide (in the economy) lifts all
boats." -- John Kennedy
11) "The basic idea behind the relationship between tax
rates and tax revenues is that changes in tax rates have two effects on
revenues: the arithmetic effect and the economic effect. The arithmetic effect
is simply that if tax rates are lowered, tax revenues (per dollar of tax base)
will be lowered by the amount of the decrease in the rate. The reverse is true
for an increase in tax rates. The economic effect, however, recognizes the
positive impact that lower tax rates have on work, output, and employment--and
thereby the tax base--by providing incentives to increase these activities.
Raising tax rates has the opposite economic effect by penalizing participation
in the taxed activities. The arithmetic effect always works in the opposite
direction from the economic effect. Therefore, when the economic and the
arithmetic effects of tax-rate changes are combined, the consequences of the
change in tax rates on total tax revenues are no longer quite so obvious."
-- Arthur Laffer explains the concept underlying the Laffer Curve
12) "What pays under capitalism is satisfying the
common man, the customer. The more people you satisfy, the better for
you." -- Ludwig Von Mises
13) "With regard to the idea of whether you have a
right to health care, you have to realize what that implies. It’s not an
abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house
and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going
to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans
my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses." -- Rand Paul
14) "Don’t knock the rich. When did a poor person ever
give you a job?" -- Laurence J. Peter
15) "America America
16) "We don’t have a trillion-dollar debt because we
haven’t taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too
much." -- Ronald Reagan
17) "Companies are not charitable enterprises: They
hire workers to make profits." -- Paul Samuelson
18) "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the
brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their
own interest." -- Adam Smith
19) "Wherever there is great property, there is great
inequality." -- Adam Smith
20) "Four things have almost invariably followed the
imposition of controls to keep prices below the level they would reach under
supply and demand in a free market: (1) increased use of the product or service
whose price is controlled, (2) Reduced supply of the same product or service,
(3) quality deterioration, (4) black markets." -- Thomas Sowell
21) "Politics offers attractive solutions but economics
can offer only trade-offs. For example, when laws are proposed to restrict the
height of apartment buildings in a community, politics presents the issue in
terms of whether we prefer tall buildings or buildings of a more modest height
in our town. Economics asks what you are prepared to trade off in order to keep
the height of buildings below some specified level. In places where land costs
may equal or even exceed the cost of the apartment buildings themselves, the
difference between allowing ten-story buildings to be built and allowing a
maximum of five stories may be that rents will be twice as high in the shorter
buildings. The question then is not simply whether you prefer shorter buildings
but how much do you prefer shorter buildings and what price are you prepared to
pay to mandate height restrictions in your community. A doubling of rents and
three additional highway fatalities per year? A tripling of rents and six
additional highway fatalities per year? Economics cannot answer such questions.
It can only make you aware of a need to ask them." -- Thomas Sowell
22) "In a small town, an idiot breaks a shop window.
He’s called a vandal, until someone points out that a window installer now must
be paid to replace the window. The window installer then will have enough money
to buy a new suit. A tailor will then be able to buy a new desk. And so on. The
whole town apparently gains from the economic activity generated by the broken
window. Of course, if this made sense, cities should hire people to run though
town, breaking windows.
But it doesn’t make sense. It’s a fallacy because the
circulating money is seen; what is not seen is what would have been done with
the money if the window were still whole. The shopkeeper, instead of paying the
window installer, might have expanded his business, or bought a new suit or a
new desk. The town is worse off because of a broken window." -- John
Stossel
23) "A thousand restaurants close every month. They
re-open, and that's good for America
24) "Suppose I hire you to repair my computer. The job
is worth $200 to me and doing the job is worth $200 to you. The transaction
will occur because we have a meeting of the mind. Now suppose there’s the
imposition of a 30 percent income tax on you. That means you won’t receive $200
but instead $140. You might say the heck with working for me — spending the day
with your family is worth more than $140. You might then offer that you’ll do
the job if I pay you $285. That way your after-tax earnings will be $200 — what
the job was worth to you. There’s a problem. The repair job was worth $200 to
me, not $285. So it’s my turn to say the heck with it. This simple example
demonstrates that one effect of taxes is that of eliminating transactions, and
hence jobs." -- Walter Williams
25) "How many times have we heard ‘free tuition,’ ‘free
health care,’ and free you-name-it? If a particular good or service is truly
free, we can have as much of it as we want without the sacrifice of other goods
or services. Take a ‘free’ library; is it really free? The answer is no. Had
the library not been built, that $50 million could have purchased something
else. That something else sacrificed is the cost of the library. While users of
the library might pay a zero price, zero price and free are not one and the
same. So when politicians talk about providing something free, ask them to
identify the beneficent Santa Claus or tooth fairy." -- Walter Williams
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