1,161 Quotes About Economics


  • Author Antony Davies
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    Minimum wage proponents argue that the minimum wage prevents businesses from paying workers almost nothing. If that were true, then almost all jobs would pay exactly the minimum wage because there is no law requiring employers to pay more. Yet 99 percent of US jobs pay more than the minimum wage.

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  • Author Antony Davies
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    Since President Johnson launched the War on Poverty, the government has spent more than $22 trillion (adjusted for inflation). That’s more than three times what the United States has spent on all the actual wars it has fought in its history - combined.

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  • Author Antony Davies
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    At some point in our history we decided that the coercive power of government should be used as a force for attaining good rather than merely a force for preventing bad. This point of view replaced the previous view, which held that government is a necessary though dangerous thing. In short, we traded in Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson for FDR.

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  • Author Antony Davies
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    It turns out that it is easier for an employer to prove that it did not hire a disabled worker for a reason unrelated to the worker’s disability than it is to prove that it fired the worker for such a reason. Consequently, the Americans with Disabilities Act actually led to a decrease in employment rates for the disabled. The law had exactly the opposite effect that lawmakers intended.

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  • Author Antony Davies
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    The first steps toward gun control in the United States, though, were doubtlessly rooted in racism. The first gun control measures in this country were designed to keep firearms out of the hands of newly freed slaves upon conclusion of the Civil War.

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  • Author Karl Marx
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    To the capitalist, every luxury of the worker seems to be reprehensible, and everything that goes beyond the most abstract need – be it in the realm of passive enjoyment, or a manifestation of activity – seems to him a luxury.

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  • Author David Graeber
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    Economics [...] has the advantage of joining an extremely simple model of human nature with extremely complicated mathematical formulae that non-specialists can rarely understand, much less criticize.

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