1,161 Quotes About Economics

Whether you agree with its policy or not, your dealing with government is not voluntary, but coercive. Government is the very antithesis of ‘free market’.

The essential of the guild-idea is that [of] men pursuing the same form of activity, but only in cooperation limited to the end of preserving the economic freedom-that is the property and livelihood-of each member of the guild.

It is not the fault of the entrepreneurs that the consumers, the people, the common man, prefer liquor to Bibles and detective stories to serious books, and that governments prefer guns to butter. The entrepreneur does not make greater profits in selling bad things than in selling good things. His profits are the greater the better he succeeds in providing the consumers with those things they ask for most intensely.

Saying that you are moral because you believe in a god is like saying you are an economist because you play monopoly.

[I]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.

Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it. -Andrew Young, author, civil rights activist, US congressman, mayor, and UN ambassador (b. 1932)

Property monopolized or in the possession of a few is a curse to mankind.

Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine - the special pleading of selfish interests.

Usually when people talk about the trickle-down theory, it has to do with economics. The richer people at the top of a society become, supposedly, the more wealth there is to trickle down to the people below. It never really works out that way, of course, because if there are 2 things people at the top can't stand, they have to be leakage and overflow.