bkmarcus.com : quotes : economics

We need laissez-faire, not because it creates the best of all possible worlds but because anything you do in the attempt to improve on it will make matters worse.

Sudha Shenoy (PDF)

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it.

The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

Thomas Sowell

Prices aren't just made up.

Walter E. Williams, "Market Wonders"

Prices are signals. They communicate vital information about the state of resources, goods, and services. Changes in those signals indicate changes in prevailing conditions -- and stimulate remedial action: conservation by consumers and new supplies and alternative products from entrepreneurs. The idea that anything good can come from distorting or squelching those signals is astounding in its lack of wisdom. It's equivalent to believing that a person with a fever can be helped by placing his thermometer in ice water.

Sheldon Richman, Canute's Courtiers Were Wrong

A regulation is essentially a tax on nonmonetary wealth such as time, liberty, energy, and property.

James Ostrowski

Harvard economist W. Kip Viscusi has shown that federal safety-cap regulations have had no effect on the rate of poisoning deaths among children: Since caps are labeled "childproof," parents are apparently less careful about keeping the medicine out of children's reach. So, some greater number of children find those more-available bottles, pry them open, and take the drugs -- thereby offsetting any gains from the regulation.

Jonathan Tranger,
"The economic and social benefits of a less-regulated United States"

Did you know that the administration of George Bush the First endorsed more costly regulatory legislation than had any other administration since Richard Nixon -- also a Republican? Let no one say that the GOP is the enemy of the regulated society.

Jonathan Tranger,
"The economic and social benefits of a less-regulated United States"

During the French Revolution hundreds of businessmen died on the guillotine because they had dared to calculate prices in gold or ask for gold.

Hans F. Sennholz

The principle of voluntarism should not be excluded, a priori, from the realm of monetary policy.

Gary North

Legal fictions are far more difficult to impose on men if the absurdity of that fiction is exposed, hour by hour, by an autonomous free market mechanism.

Gary North

Prices are the free market's greatest achievement in reducing the irrationality of human affairs.

Gary North

Every price reflects the composite of all predictors' expectations.

Gary North

What we find in the price-fixing of currencies is exactly what we find in the price-fixing of all other commodities: Periods of inflexible, politically imposed "stability" interspersed with great economic discontinuities.

Gary North

For those who prefer tidal waves to the splashing of the surf, for those who prefer earthquakes to slowly shifting earth movements, the rationale of the political monopoly of money may appear sane. It is strange that anyone else believes in it.

Gary North

The defense of the free market must be in terms of its capacity to expand the range of choices open to freemen. It is an ethical defense.

Gary North

Now you can see why a parrot could be a passably good economist. Simply teach it to answer "supply and demand" to every question!

Professor Henry Spearman
Harvard Professor of Economics & Amateur Detective
Murder at the Margin

The Cold War "iron curtain" between East and West has been replaced with a customs curtain between North and South.

Johan Norberg

Government failure, yes, but private defense? Before you say this is an outlandish idea, remember that just about everything else done in the private sector sounds, at some level, implausible. What if I told you that oil needs to be extracted from the bottom of the ocean, converted and refined into gasoline, and then made available to every American not far from his house, on demand and at the price of bottled water?

Lew Rockwell

They get nothing for something, which is always the small-print inscription on the other side of something for nothing.

Gary North, THE GOLD WARS, Issue #7

The West has bet its future on fractional reserve banking. This is additional evidence that the West is doomed.

Gary North, THE GOLD WARS, Issue #7

The reason grocery stores sell soup is because this is a cheaper and a better way of getting soup than any other way that is known. Let the individual conclude that the price of soup in cans is too costly or the final product is inferior to home-made soup and he will obtain his own ingredients through his own efforts. Then he will make his own soup.

Robert LeFevre, Capitalism

... if you begin inhibiting productive people, there will be less total production. If at the same time, you turn around and take persons who may not be productive, in spite of their wishes to be ... you take the existing amount of wealth and you place it out at a level where it can be consumed more rapidly That does not solve poverty. That increases poverty and spreads it out farther. And that is precisely what we have been doing in this country thanks to government interference.

Robert LeFevre

The government has spent a hundred billion dollars in ... trying to solve the poverty problem through the program of redistributing the wealth and all it has accomplished is that it has redistributed the poverty!

Robert LeFevre

... redistributing does not solve a problem: it merely redistributes the problem!

Robert LeFevre

If you're going to solve the problem, you're going to have to do it another way, and the only way to do it is, I believe, the libertarian approach to help the poor, and what is that? You stop inhibiting them! Open the doors and let them produce. They want to. They are good producers.

Robert LeFevre

What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.

Henry George

Empires are noted for military strength at the beginning and fiscal weakness at the end.

Gary North

It will not be enemies at the gates who overwhelm the American empire. It will be the army of politically armed economic dependents inside the gates.

Gary North

When something cannot go on, it has a tendency to stop.

Herb Stein, chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers

The war against economic freedom always begins with the state's assertion of sovereignty over money.

Gary North

Expenditures rise to meet income.

Parkinson's Law

Price controls will make things worse. Believe me, I've been there ... Controls have not worked in 40 centuries. They will not work now.

C. Jackson Grayson, who headed Nixon's price-wage control experiment from 1971 to 1973

One of the last refuges of someone whose pet project or theory has been exposed as economic nonsense is to say: "Economics is all very well, but there are also non-economic values to consider." Presumably, these are supposed to be higher and nobler concerns that soar above the level of crass materialism.

Of course there are non-economic values. In fact, there are only non-economic values.... Economics does not say you should make the most money possible.... What lofty talk about "non-economic values" usually boils down to is that some people do not want their own particular values weighed against anything.

Thomas Sowell

What is called 'capitalism' might more accurately be called consumerism. It is the consumers who call the tune, and the capitalists who want to remain capitalists have to learn to dance to it.

Thomas Sowell

It would be silly for me to contend that only professional economists should comment upon economics: I am not a professional economist myself, and I'll spout off on the subject at the drop of a hat.

Gene Callahan

An increased supply of goods produced will raise the demand for money and also therefore lower the overall level of prices.

Murray N. Rothbard, The Mystery of Banking

Take the Christmas tree. Once a man would locate a nice spruce in the forest, chop it down, drag it home, and his family would festoon it with homemade ornaments. Total effort: about a day's worth. Today's urban paterfamilias buys a spruce someone else chopped down for his family to festoon with commercial ornaments. Suppose he earns $50,000 per year. A nice spruce costs about $50 and some new ornaments perhaps $100. That $150 is about one day's income, representing a day's effort. Each man has, directly or indirectly, exchanged his labor for a decorated tree. Who is to say which is more spiritual?

Michael Levin, Christmas Movies and Bad Economics

The principle that both sides benefit from trade is readily visible when it involves two parties within a country; it somehow becomes confused when an invisible political barrier separates the parties. Neither the mercantilists of yesteryear nor those who fuss about the trade deficit today have ever satisfactorily answered this fundamental question: Since each and every trade is "favorable" to the individual traders, how is it possible that these transactions can be totaled up to produce something "unfavorable"?

Lawrence W. Reed, "The Trade Deficit: Much Ado About Nothing"

Urban philharmonic orchestras are not now, nor have the ever been, supported by the fans of classical music. They have been supported by the political victims of the fans of classical music.

Gary North

While "poor" Americans don't live in opulence, they are surely not poor either by international or historical standards in our own country. I'm betting if God condemned an unborn spirit to a lifetime of poverty but He left him free to choose the country in which to be poor, he'd choose United States.

Walter E. Williams, "A Nation of 'Hamburger Flippers'?"

How many times have we heard that the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer? Contrary to that nonsense, the fact of the matter is that some of the rich are getting poorer, and many of the poorer are getting richer.

Walter E. Williams, "A Nation of 'Hamburger Flippers'?"

There're a lot of things we can disagree about, but let's have straight thinking as a part of the process.

Walter E. Williams, "Economic Straight Thinking"

I think some of the ignorance and much of the demagoguery stems from the usage of the phrase "income distribution". It might make some people think income is distributed; in other words there's a dealer of dollars. The reason that some people have few dollars while others have millions upon millions is that the dollar dealer is unjust. An alternative vision might be that there's a pile of money intended for all of us. The reason why some are rich and some are poor is that the greedy rich got to the pile first and took their unfair share. Clearly, in either case, justice would require a re-dealing, or redistribution, of the dollars where the government takes ill-gotten gains of the few and returns them to their rightful owners.

Walter E. Williams, "From Whence Comes Income?"

Sure we'd be paying lower prices but the selling price of a good is just one element of its cost. The full cost of a good includes all additional resources expended for its acquisition. These additional resources might include time and travel that are by no means free.

Walter E. Williams, "Market Wonders"

When a good becomes scarce, there are several socially optimal responses: consumers should economize on its usage and search for cheaper substitutes. Producers should increase production of the good and search for substitutes. Rising prices provide both consumers and producers with incentives to behave in socially optimal ways. Plus, they do so voluntarily.

Walter E. Williams, "Market Wonders"

Prices aren't just made up. Prices are important market signals reflecting the relative scarcity conditions of any good. Rising prices imply an increase in the scarcity, or expected scarcity, of a good. In other words, if a good becomes scarcer or is expected to become scarcer, it's price will rise. The opposite is true when a good becomes abundant or is expected to become abundant.

Walter E. Williams, "Market Wonders"

Markets are not perfect. After all markets consist of millions upon millions of imperfect independent decision-makers like you and me. Abundant evidence, not faith, demonstrates that markets are far more reliable and predictable than a bunch of arrogant politicians and bureaucrats.

Walter E. Williams, "Market Wonders"

When I was in college I took two intro economics courses: macroeconomics and microeconomics. Macro was full of theories like "low unemployment causes inflation" that never quite stood up to reality. But the micro stuff was both cool and useful. It was full of interesting concepts about the relationships between supply and demand that really did work.

Joel Spolsky, Strategy Letter V

All else being equal, demand for a product increases when the prices of its complements decrease.

Let me repeat that because you might have dozed off, and it's important. Demand for a product increases when the prices of its complements decrease. For example, if flights to Miami become cheaper, demand for hotel rooms in Miami goes up -- because more people are flying to Miami and need a room.

Joel Spolsky, Strategy Letter V

At this point, it's pretty common for people to try to confuse things by saying, "aha! But Linux is FREE!" OK. First of all, when an economist considers price, they consider the total price, including some intangible things like the time it takes to set up, reeducate everyone, and convert existing processes. All the things that we like to call "total cost of ownership."

Secondly, by using the free-as-in-beer argument, these advocates try to believe that they are not subject to the rules of economics because they've got a nice zero they can multiply everything by.

Joel Spolsky, Strategy Letter V

To summarize, I'm not very impressed by people who try to prove wild economic things about free-as-in-beer software, because they're just getting divide-by-zero errors as far as I'm concerned.

Joel Spolsky, Strategy Letter V

Once again: demand for a product increases when the price of its complements decreases. In general, a company's strategic interest is going to be to get the price of their complements as low as possible. The lowest theoretically sustainable price would be the "commodity price" -- the price that arises when you have a bunch of competitors offering indistinguishable goods. So: Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements. If you can do this, demand for your product will increase and you will be able to charge more and make more.

Joel Spolsky, Strategy Letter V

The low prices, of course, increase demand. Increased demand for PCs meant increased demand for their complement, MS-DOS. All else being equal, the greater the demand for a product, the more money it makes for you. And that's why Bill Gates can buy Sweden and you can't.

Joel Spolsky, Strategy Letter V

The American economy is the eighth wonder of the world; the ninth is the economic ignorance of the American people.

Arthur Levitt, former chairman of the New York Stock Exchange

Economic ignorance is the breeding ground of totalitarianism.

John Jewkes, British Economist

Sound economics, stripped of ideological bias, teaches us that everything of value has a cost that somebody must pay. It informs us that a higher standard of living, if it is not to come at someone's expense, can only come about through greater production. It tells us that nations become wealthy not by printing money or spending it, but through capital accumulation and the creation of goods and services.

How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?

The historical evidence suggests that in truly free markets, monopolies are difficult to start, harder to maintain, and tend to wither away over time.

How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?

Another textbook author confirmed the notion that at least some publishers strongly shape the contents of the text to appeal to teacher unions. "The road to the free market sometimes requires little steps," he said, "particularly when your audience consists of teachers paid by the state."

How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?

In economics, there are many settled propositions. Some examples: people seek maximum value for minimum cost; people differ in their evaluations of the same product, service or other good; changes in prices lead to changes in consumer and producer behavior; scarce goods must somehow be rationed. There are many others. A good economics text will show the student how to apply these propositions -- the laws of economics -- to any issue or controversy.

How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?

We live in a world of scarcity. There isn't enough of most things to allow people to have as much as they want. This fact is economic bedrock. From it follows the necessity of making choices in order to obtain the most satisfaction possible from our limited resources. Economics is the study of the trade-offs human beings make when they choose among scarce goods.

How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?

Another pitfall to avoid is reinforcing the common notion that monopolies are easy to create and maintain in a market with open entry. What history actually shows is that it is risky and costly to try to monopolize a market with unrestricted entry. This is why those who want to collude tend to use politics to stifle competition. The key to long-lasting monopoly has always been protective government action.

How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?

The student should understand that laws and regulations aimed at protecting competition can be used to protect competitors against competition.

How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?

The student needs to understand that the laws of economics remain in play no matter what the intentions of planning advocates may be, and usually deliver results very different from those desired.

How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?

Public Goods. A public good is a product that, when it is produced, gives automatic benefits to many. National defense and interstate highways, for example, are usually considered public goods. Once they are in place, everyone can benefit from them whether or not they paid for them. But a textbook should not make the error of assuming that everything the government provides is a public good.

How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?

Externalities. The market does not function well when the actions of one person or group negatively impact others, particularly where unwanted or undeserved costs are incurred -- pollution is one example. A text should explore the advantages and disadvantages of different options for dealing with externalities.

How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?

Economic Stability. The economy will not maximize prosperity if it suffers from inflation, high unemployment, or both. Whether economic instability is an inherent feature of a market economy, or is induced by government policy, is a question on which there is much expert disagreement; at the least, the student should be made aware of the debate. From there, the text should discuss the kinds of government policies contending experts recommend.

How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?

Regulation. The question of whether government regulation benefits or harms the welfare of citizens is an important subject for any economics textbook. The pitfall to avoid is assuming that regulations

1. yield results that are in line with the intentions of their framers,
or
2. are necessarily aimed at the public good.

Regulations often are promoted (and even drawn) by those who would be regulated. It is often easier to co-opt the regulators and get them to write the rules in your favor than it is to win victory on the battlefield of a truly competitive marketplace.

How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?

The study of the economics of political decision-making is known as public choice theory. To provide the student with a realistic analysis of the economic impact of government action, some discussion of public choice is essential. Whether it is done in a separate chapter, or touched upon at various points when the subject of government arises, a good text will remind the student that the interests of politicians and bureaucrats is not necessarily the same as the "public interest."

How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?

A good treatment of public choice will include an explanation of voter incentives to acquire information, special interest group legislation, "rent seeking," and the reason regulatory agencies are often "captured" by the industries they regulate.

How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?

Many texts have something to say about the Great Depression. Several uncritically repeat the myths that President Hoover was a laissez faire president, that the depression was caused by free markets, and that President Franklin Roosevelt's interventionist policies produced prosperity. These assertions have been revealed by subsequent scholarship to be little more than propaganda.

How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?

The truth is that government intervention may have caused the Depression, and almost certainly prolonged it.

How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?

Wages are prices, and are subject to the same forces that affect all prices.

How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?

Trying to repeal the laws of economics in labor markets doesn't work any better than trying to do so anywhere else.

How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?

When did 'free trade' come to mean its opposite? As with so much else, it was World War II that changed everything. The trust and deference that the American people gave the government during the war spilled over to the postwar plans for carving up the spoils. At the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, trade came to mean investment guarantees and global bureaucracies in statist treaties between governments. This was central planning exalted to new heights.

Lew Rockwell, Speaking of Liberty, p. 144

The problem for Mises was that he bucked the fashionable opinions of the time, rejected the planning mentality, and persistently and consistently insisted the purest free market position, even when everyone around him was caving in. [...] And yet, at the lowest point in his life, Mises had only one regret: that he had not been even tougher and less compromising.

Lew Rockwell, Speaking of Liberty

Most economists are political weather vanes.

Lew Rockwell, Speaking of Liberty, p. 347

Amazing, isn't it? Congress passes a tariff, and the next thing you know, American exporters are going bankrupt. So Congress passes export subsidies, and the next thing you know, prices for everything start going up. So Congress passes price controls, and the next thing you know, everything starts getting scarce. So Congress passes a rationing scheme, and the next thing you know, the world economy collapses. What's a Congress to do?

Gary North, Buy American!

If we ask Americans to buy American-made products, and only American-made products, then we are telling American producers to sell to American buyers, and only to American buyers. If people who want all Americans to "buy American" are not willing to admit that they are calling for American producers to sell only to Americans, then they had better drop their slogan.

Gary North, Buy American!

I won't borrow money to buy a car. I don't borrow money to pay for any depreciating asset. So, I limit myself to used cars, and normally used cars that are at least five years old.

Gary North

The fallacy of composition works like this: It's true that if an individual at a football game stands up, he can see the game better. But if everyone stands up, nobody can see any better.

Robert Murphy, "Who Benefits From Free Trade, and How"

So long as we live on this earth, there are certain fixed cause and effect relationships at work that cannot be repealed. Among them is that an economy pumped up by artificial credit will eventually enter recession. When it happens and what the effects will be is an open question. But that it will happen cannot be in dispute.

Lew Rockwell, Words in Defense of Liberty

... every economic theory I'm aware of says more information sooner is better than less information later.

Jim Cox, The Concise Guide To Economics, Chapter 15: Heroic Insider Trading

For every dime saved in consumer prices, one more dime is made available for other pursuits, whether savings, consumption, or investment.

Lew Rockwell, A World Recreated

For every dime saved in consumer prices, one more dime is made available for other pursuits, whether savings, consumption, or investment. It is this fact which is subsidizing American prosperity right now.

Lew Rockwell, A World Recreated

Far from being a sign that America has lost its edge, [the importing of foreign goods] constitutes the world's gift to American consumers.

Lew Rockwell, A World Recreated

[International] trade is mutually beneficial, producing winners on all sides, with the only losers being those American producers who can't seem to drive their costs down low enough to compete in the world marketplace. It is because of this, and despite the constant attempts by central banks to inflate the currency, that prices are continuing to fall for consumer goods.

Lew Rockwell, A World Recreated

A glance at the economic system and methods of totalitarian states -- of the Soviet bloc, for example -- is enough to show that state-ownership of the means of production does not lead to an increase of wealth for the people but, on the contrary, to their exploitation, whereas the reverse is true of the free countries and peoples, which are denounced for their so-called capitalism but which clearly illustrates how private ownership of the means of production is contributing more and more to the general welfare.

Ludwig Erhard

[Germany's] social market advocates were too relaxed; they believed the new order would produce enlightened people who would not need market incentives to behave responsibly. How wrong they were. Germans are normal, rational people. They will not work unless they have to. Now it often pays not to get a job and it is rational to stay in education until you are 30.

Professor Norman Barry, the Financial Times of London

I champion an economic order ruled by free prices and markets...the only economic order compatible with human freedom.

Wilhelm Ropke (1899-1966)

Mises was right.

formerly pro-socialist, millionaire economics textbook author Robert Heilbroner, The New Yorker, 1990

It is not that money circulates that makes it money. Lots of goods circulate. It is that money is hoarded -- is in someone's possession as a cash balance -- that is crucial for its service as a medium of exchange.

Gary North, Mises On Money

Admitting that money measures objective prices is not the same as saying that money is a measure of value, which is subjective.

Gary North, Mises On Money

Price competition is not deflation.

Gary North, Mises On Money

If there were a free market in money, there would be falling prices. Supply would equal demand at prices steadily approaching zero as a limit.

Gary North, Mises On Money

Mises did not recommend government monetary policy. He recommended anti-government monetary policy.

Gary North, Mises On Money

Everything in bank legislation is tied to one of two goals: preventing bank runs or bailing out bankrupt banks before the panic spreads to other banks. That is, everything in banking legislation is geared to the systematic violation of contracts, either before the bank run or after it begins.

Gary North, Mises On Money

Mises made clear that the State does not establish economic laws of exchange. It is subordinate to these laws.

Gary North, Mises On Money

The free market establishes free coinage.

Gary North, Mises On Money

[C]hanges in the money [supply] cannot be neutral. There will inevitably be winners and losers.

Gary North, Mises On Money

... a metallic money standard hampers the State

Gary North, Mises On Money

Economic logic does not end or begin at a political border. There are no economic laws linking individuals within borders that do not also apply to individuals across borders.

Gary North, Mises On Money

Mises believed that an unhampered free market is likely to produce a slowly rising money supply and slowly falling prices.

Gary North, Mises On Money

By 1951, Mises understood that, despite the private ownership of the central banks, governments had created them and had always protected them from bank runs.

Gary North, Mises On Money

There has been a joint effort by governments and their monopolistic central banks to destroy free market money.

Gary North, Mises On Money

To analyze any economic problem, you only need a pair of parrots, one on each shoulder. One is trained to say, "Supply and demand! Supply and demand!" The other says, "High bid wins!" The trick is to listen to them in the correct order, and also to avoid getting dumped on, either by the parrots or economists with their parrots, who are trained to say, "Unfair initial distribution!" and "In the long run, we're all dead!"

Gary North, Mises On Money

[Ludwig von Mises's] most important and unique contribution was a single idea, which is denied by all other schools of economic opinion:

The State's coercive interference in either money or banking, including its licensing of a monopolistic central bank, reduces all men's freedom and most men's wealth.

Gary North, Mises On Money

Where statist money is concerned, Mises had only one suggestion: do not add to the money supply. Enough is enough.

[...]

This position has a corollary, which Mises stated explicitly: the State and the central bank must not interfere with bank runs.

Gary North, Mises On Money

There should be no State intervention of any kind in saving over-extended banks that are being bankrupted by their depositors. It is the State's attempt to undermine contracts that is the root cause of credit-money inflation. ... The threat of bankruptcy must be on the mind of every banker at all times ...

Gary North, Mises On Money

A bank run is the depositors' negative sanction that provides them with their sovereignty over their own property, i.e., their money.

Gary North, Mises On Money

There ain't no such thing as a free government-guaranteed gold standard.

Gary North, Mises On Money

The defenders of central banking have persuaded the public that the great advantage of central banking is "flexible money." The public is going to get flexible money, good and hard.

Gary North, Mises On Money

An official price is set by government officials. That is the problem with every official price.

Gary North, Mises On Money

The classical, government-guaranteed gold standard was never any better than a government's promise to allow the public to redeem gold at an officially fixed price. In every case, governments eventually defaulted.

Gary North, Mises On Money

Mises's answer to the question, "What kind of money should we have?" was simple: "whatever individuals voluntarily choose to use."

Gary North, Mises On Money

Money is market-generated. It is also market-regulated. It is a product of consumer sovereignty, not State sovereignty.

Gary North, Mises On Money

The State is always an interloper in monetary affairs. The State reduces market freedom and efficiency. The State makes things worse from the point of view of long-term economic stability. So does the State's now-independent step-child, central banking.

Gary North, Mises On Money

Monetary reform, when it comes, will be imposed from the bottom up.

Gary North, Mises On Money

Mises's theory of money and credit shows us why the central bankers cannot win, just as his theory of economic calculation showed us why Marxist central planners could not win. Unfortunately, it took seven decades of economic losses and about a hundred million needless deaths to confirm his theory.

Gary North, Mises On Money

Here is my advice: do not adopt a theory of money and banking until you understand the free market. Money and banking are not independent of the free market. They are extensions of the free market. When searching for a consistent theory of money, begin with a consistent theory of the free market.

Gary North, Mises On Money

Notice the nuance in the message. The point is not that free trade necessarily makes people better off than they have been so far. Rather, it makes them better off than they would be if trade were to be henceforth obstructed by government interventions, or by other violations of property rights.

J.G. Hulsmann, "Capital Exports and Free Trade"

Notice that the division of labor is beneficial for all parties involved not only when each producer is superior to the other in some special field. It also holds true when one of them is more productive than the other in all fields. ... For most noneconomists, this is certainly a surprising aspect of the division of labor.

J.G. Hulsmann, "Capital Exports and Free Trade"

The division of labor is a blessing for all people. Superior and inferior producers can be true social partners.

J.G. Hulsmann, "Capital Exports and Free Trade"

To see their error, we have to do above all one thing: We have to think in terms of alternatives; we have to adopt the economic point of view.

J.G. Hulsmann, "Capital Exports and Free Trade"

We might for the sake of argument assume that the decline will be absolute -- impoverishment of all people who depend on wage income. All of this cannot in the least affect the case for free trade. The only relevant question is how free trade stands up to its only logical alternative: government intervention. Can we make ourselves better off by letting government prevent capital from crossing borders? That is the only relevant question, and the answer is in the negative.

J.G. Hulsmann, "Capital Exports and Free Trade"

Protectionism produces poverty.

J.G. Hulsmann, "Capital Exports and Free Trade"

Free trade is not merely the policy that alone is worthy of a free nation. It is also from a narrow materialistic point of view far superior to its only logical alternative: letting government ruin trade and the worldwide division of labor.

J.G. Hulsmann, "Capital Exports and Free Trade"

... government "solutions" can be economically justified only if they can be demonstrated to be less costly than the "market failure" they allegedly address. This does not generate a long list of legitimate government programs.

Gary M. Galles , "Half-Truths or Consequences", The Freeman

... in a society that demands more of its government than it is willing to pay for, as in both Europe and the United States, control of the public treasury requires that those with the least political power suffer the most.

Jack Powelson, The Quaker Economist, Letter no. 95

From the standpoint of productivity, it matters not whether a war is paid for by borrowing, taxing, or inflating. In all three cases, resources are diverted from the productive economy of wealth creation to the destructive economy of war-fighting.

H.A. Scott Trask, "War Finance: Theory and History"

The inequality of wealth and the formation of distinctive classes might be the natural result of the differentiation of intelligence, the specialization of labor, the accumulation of capital, the protection of property, and family inheritance. It might also be the result of political privilege and power, and fiscal extravagance supported by the funding system.

H.A. Scott Trask, "War Finance: Theory and History"

I think people are suspicious about Capitalism because they mistake self-interest of the market for selfishness. A selfish person transgresses on the rights of others, but self-interest is not a social attribute and can even be practised on a deserted island.

Morality and the market, Gurcharan Das, Times of India, Sunday, January 25th, 2004

A well-known joke illustrating the EMH [Efficient Markets Hypothesis] concerns two finance professors walking down the street. One spots a $100 bill lying on the pavement. He brings this to the attention of his colleague, who says, "That cannot be a $100 bill or someone would have already picked it up." And so they continue walking.

(I first heard this joke some years ago with a $10 bill. It would seem that fiat money inflation has eroded even the nominal value of jokes.)

Robert Blumen, "Are Bubbles Efficient?"

To see the importance of difference of opinion, consider the following example: a stock trade has two parties: the seller who thinks that the stock is worth no more than the price at which it trades, and a buyer who thinks that it is worth no less. If everyone held the same beliefs about the future, there would be no trading at all.

Robert Blumen, "Are Bubbles Efficient?"

The paradox of the EMH [Efficient Markets Hypothesis] is that it assumes the existence of entrepreneurs seizing profit opportunities to prove that there are no profit opportunities for entrepreneurs.

Robert Blumen, "Are Bubbles Efficient?"

Like the children of Lake Wobegon, many investors believed that stock market returns would always be above average.

Robert Blumen, "Are Bubbles Efficient?"

Q: How many economists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: None, the market will take care of it.

Robert Blumen, "Are Bubbles Efficient?"

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

Adam Smith

Central banks are tools of the very rich to protect their capital. The central banks♠primary function is to protect large commercial banks. This reduces risk for the owners of those banks and their senior managers. But the cost of this risk reduction is transferred to the general public.

Gary North, "Bankers: Their Gains, Our Risks"

Howard Ruff's law of government is: "Government is dumb." My corollary is: "So are its bankers."

Gary North, "Bankers: Their Gains, Our Risks"

The dollar is doomed in the long run, because U.S. government debt, including unfunded Social Security and Medicare debt, cannot be repaid except with fiat money. Default will come, but it will be disguised by monetary inflation.

Gary North, "Bankers: Their Gains, Our Risks"

An unfortunate consequence of learning Bastiat's "Broken Window Fallacy" is the accompanying frustration of seeing this age old economic fallacy reappear ad nauseam.

Jude Blanchette, The Bogeyman of Lost Jobs

Peace is always cheaper than war.

Paul Craig Roberts, "Watching Propaganda Become Truth"

Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore.

Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson

... the whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence: the art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate, but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group, but for all groups.

Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson

There is a strange idea abroad, held by all monetary cranks, that credit is something a banker gives to a man. Credit, on the contrary, is something a man already has. He has it, perhaps, because he already has marketable assets of a greater cash value than the loan for which he is asking. Or he has it because his character and past record have earned it. He brings it into the bank with him. That is why the banker makes him a loan. The banker is not giving something for nothing.

Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson

The government never lends or gives anything to business that it does not take away from business ... When the government makes loans or subsidies to business, what it does is to tax successful private business in order to support unsuccessful private business.

Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson

When your money is taken by a thief, you get nothing in return. When your money is taken through taxes to support needless bureaucrats, precisely the same situation exists.

Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson

The real question is not how many millions of jobs there will be in America ten years from now, but how much shall we produce, and what, in consequence, will be our standard of living? The problem of distribution, on which all the stress is being put today, is after all more easily solved the more there is to distribute.

Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson

In the long run, notwithstanding the mountains of argument pro and con, a tariff is irrelevant to the question of employment ... But a tariff is not irrelevant to the question of wages. In the long run it always reduces real wages, because it reduces efficiency, production and wealth.

Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson

... the real gain of foreign trade to any country lies not in its exports but in its imports. Its consumers are either able to get from abroad commodities at a lower price than they could obtain them for at home, or commodities that they could not get from domestic producers at all. Outstanding examples in the United States are coffee and tea. Collectively considered, the real reason a country needs exports is to pay for its imports.

Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson

Paradoxically as it may seem to some, it is just as necessary to the health of a dynamic economy that dying industries be allowed to die as that growing industries be allowed to grow. The first process is essential to the second.

Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson

Prices are determined by supply and demand, and demand is determined by how intensely people want a commodity and what they have to offer in exchange for it. It is true that supply is in part determined by costs of production. What a commodity has cost to produce in the past cannot determine its value. That will depend on the present relationship of supply and demand.

Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson

It is typical of government price-fixing schemes that they escape on undesired consequence only by plunging into another and usually worse one.

Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson

We cannot distribute more wealth than is created. We cannot in the long run pay labor as a whole more than it produces. The best way to raise wages, therefore, is to raise marginal labor productivity.

Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson

The indignation shown by many people today at the mention of the very word profit indicates how little understanding there is of the vital function that profits pay in our economy.

Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson

Contrary to a popular impression, profits are achieved not by raising prices, but by introducing economics and efficiencies that cut costs of production.

Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson

The most obvious and yet the oldest and most stubborn error on which the appeal of inflation rests is that of confusing "money" with wealth ... Real wealth, of course, consists in what is produced and consumed; the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in. It is railways and roads and motor cars; ships and planes and factories; schools and churches and theaters; pianos, paintings and books.

Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson

Deficit spending, once embarked upon, creates powerful vested interests which demand its continuance under all conditions.

Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson

Inflation itself is a form of taxation. It is perhaps the worst possible form, which usually bears hardest on those least able to pay ... It is a tax not only on every individual's expenditures, but on his savings account ...

Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson

More than forty years after the publication of John Maynard Keynes' General Theory, and more than twenty years after that book has been thoroughly discredited by analysis and experience, a great number of our politicians are still unceasingly recommending more deficit spending in order to cure or reduce existing unemployment.

Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson

One of the worst results of the retention of the Keynesian myths is that it not only promotes greater and greater inflation, but that it systematically diverts attention from the real causes of our unemployment, such as excessive union wage-rates, minimum wage laws, excessive and prolonged unemployment insurance, and overgenerous relief payments.

Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson

Yet Social Security today is still sacrosanct. It is considered political suicide for any congressman to suggest cutting down or cutting back not only present but promised future benefits. The American Social Security system must stand today as a frightening symbol of the almost inevitable tendency of any national relief, redistribution, or "insurance" scheme, once established, to run completely out of control.

Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson

More and more people are becoming aware that government has nothing to give them without first taking it away from somebody else -- or from themselves. Increased handouts to selected groups mean merely increased taxes, or increased deficits and increased inflation.

Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson

The notion that we can dismiss the views of all previous thinkers surely leaves no basis for the hope that our own work will prove of any value to others.

Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson

The essay on Free Trade at The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics looks at the issue of international trade policy. In the essay, Alan Blinder states that "one study estimated that in 1984 U.S. consumers paid $42,000 annually for each textile job that was preserved by import quotas, a sum that greatly exceeded the average earnings of a textile worker. That same study estimated that restricting foreign imports cost $105,000 annually for each automobile worker's job that was saved, $420,000 for each job in TV manufacturing, and $750,000 for every job saved in the steel industry."

Mike Moffatt

In the year 2000 President Bush raised tariffs on imported steel goods between 8 and 30 percent. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy cites a study which indicates that the tariff will reduce U.S. national income by between 0.5 to 1.4 billion dollars. The study estimates that less than 10,000 jobs in the steel industry will be saved by the measure at a cost of over $400,000 per job saved. For every job saved by this measure, 8 will be lost.

Mike Moffatt

The National Center For Policy Analysis estimates that in 1994 tariffs cost the U.S. economy 32.3 billion dollars or $170,000 for every job saved. Tariffs in Europe cost European consumers $70,000 per job saved while Japanese consumers lost $600,000 per job saved through Japanese tariffs.

Mike Moffatt

Until the Fed's creation, there was no overall upward trend in the price level. Inflation occurred during wars, but prices then gradually declined to their former levels. Since the establishment of the Fed, however, there has been a continuous upward surge in prices.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo, "The Myth of the 'Independent' Fed"

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

Thomas Sowell

At a time when nationalist "us versus them" thinking is back in vogue, the temptation is strong to find someone -- ideally brown people with funny accents -- to carry the blame for our economic woes.

Julian Sanchez

I regard free trade as involving considerations far higher than mere commercial advantages as great as they are. It is, in my opinion, emphatically the cause of civilization and peace.

John C. Calhoun, Old South free trade theorist writing to the Manchester Anti-Corn Law League in 1845

But since the dollar is the medium of oil purchases, OPEC gets hosed when the dollar drops, while we continue to import oil at the same price. One might ask why OPEC goes along with this charade. In fact, some oil-exporting nations have discussed switching to the Euro, to gold, or to a basket of currencies. But this would undoubtedly raise the ire of some very heavily armed people. The last guy who switched from dollars to Euros for oil purchases was Saddam Hussein.

Steven LaTulippe, "The Curious Bush Recovery"

Uncle Sam Inc. will spend more money in just this year [2005] than it spent combined from 1787-1900 -- even after adjusting for inflation.

Stephen Moore, "Pricey Government Prize"

In 1940, 4 million Americans worked for government and 11 million worked in manufacturing. Today, there are 7 million more Americans working for government (21.5 million) than in all manufacturing industries (14.5 million). We have shifted from an economy of people who make things, to an economy of people who tax, regulate, subsidize and outlaw things.

Stephen Moore, "Pricey Government Prize"

While I have never patronized a prostitute, I know that one can learn more about a country from speaking to the madam of a brothel or a black marketeer than from meeting a foreign minister.

Jim Rogers, Adventure Capitalist

There is a basic law of all debt: "There are more debtors who vote than creditors who vote." Any creditor who does not understand this law is going to get a memorable education eventually.

Gary North, "A Trillion Here, A Trillion There"

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, or the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but their regard to their own interest.

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Economics is ... "The science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses."

Lionel Robbins of the London School of Economics (1932)

At a conference in Cordoba, Argentina, Ken Galbraith of Harvard and I were the speakers. I argued that inflation was robbery, but Galbraith said a little inflation was necessary for prosperity. So I told the audience that Galbraith favored a little robbery. However, he was speaking in English and I in Spanish, so he did not understand me.

Jack Powelson, The Quaker Economist

Ask the government to help the consumer and you're asking for a bigger and bigger system of special-interest groups screwing the public.

Angus Black, A Radicals Guide to Economic Reality

Of late I have a new and depressing example of popular economic thinking, in the policy of arbitrary price-fixing. Can there be any use in explaining, if it is needful to explain, that fixing a price below the free-market level will create a shortage and one above it a surplus? But the public oh's and ah's and yips and yaps at the shortage of residential housing and surpluses of eggs and potatoes as if these things presented problems any more than getting one's footgear soiled by deliberately walking in the mud.

Frank Hyneman Knight (1885-1972)

... special-interest groups often set the terms of public debate by starting a "cascade." There is evidence, for example, that the anti-smoking campaign has something to do with support from nicotine patch manufacturers, just as Prohibition owed something to the financial support of soft-drink manufactures.

David J. Theroux, The Independent Institute

National saving is the only way a country can have its capital and own it too. Models of the economic growth process identify national saving as one of the key policy variables in influencing a nation's living standards in the long run.

Edward Gramlich, Federal Reserve System Board of Governors

Things that cannot go on have a tendency to stop.

Herb Stein, Nixon's chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors

Yet, we are now left with a perplexing question: If socialism does not deliver the goods like bread and automobiles in large numbers and in high quality, why does anyone believe that the practice of medicine is an exception?

William L. Anderson, "Health Care in Prison"

Does any reader believe that once it had a monopoly on the practice of mainstream medicine, that government would not come down hard upon the practitioners of alternative medicine like chiropractic and homeopathy just as it has done with anyone who competes with the U.S. Postal Service?

William L. Anderson, "Health Care in Prison"

One is forced to the realization that no matter how erudite a historian may be, his conclusions about past socioeconomic events are only as reliable as his grasp of economic theory.

Nicholas Davidson, The Ancient Suicide of the West

... the principles of the market are universal to complex economies that depend on trade and manufacturing. They did not arise from the genesis of a mystical entity called 'capitalism.'

Nicholas Davidson, The Ancient Suicide of the West

"I am not a die-hard capitalist. I do not view capitalism as a credo. Much more important to me are freedom, compassion for the poor, respect for the social contract, and equal opportunity. But for the moment, to achieve those goals, capitalism is the only game in town. It is the only system we know that provides us with the tools required to create massive surplus value."

Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumph in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, p. 228

To suppose all consumers to be dupes, and all merchants and manufacturers to be cheats, has the effect of authorizing them to be so, and of degrading all the working members of the community.

Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727-1781)

The utility of a dollar -- any dollar -- to an individual is a purely subjective phenomenon, and cannot be measured in any known unit.

John Chamberlain, "The Progressive Income Tax"

When the market decides, there is no uncertainty about the comparative rating of men's desires.

John Chamberlain, "The Progressive Income Tax"

As money income is taxed away, there is a tremendous competition to get income in terms of social services (untaxed).

John Chamberlain, "The Progressive Income Tax"

Socialists used to talk about working together as a community but global trade shows that the best way to work together as a community is to work separately and exchange to our mutual benefit.

Lew Rockwell, "Your Right to Deflation"

Socialism has inflated the demand for medical services and government restrictions have artificially limited supply.

Lew Rockwell, "Your Right to Deflation"

No self-respecting economist would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment. Such a claim, if seriously advanced, becomes equivalent to a denial that there is even minimum scientific content in economics... Fortunately, only a handful of economists are willing to throw over the teaching of two centuries.

Nobel Laureate James Buchanan

In the twentieth century, fractional reserve bankers won the war of economic ideas: Keynesianism, monetarism, and supply-side economics. They also won the political wars. They succeeded in getting all governments to de-monetize gold, thereby creating unbreakable banking cartels (but not unbreakable currencies). The result was the decline in purchasing power of the dollar by 94%, 1913-2000.

Gary North, "The Re-Monetization of Gold"

The West has bet its future on fractional reserve banking. This is additional evidence that the West is doomed. It has placed the extension of the division of labor into the hands of the bankers' cartel.

Gary North, "The Re-Monetization of Gold"

... just as with the whole history of product regulation, especially in Republican administrations, the large producers run roughshod over the small ones by harnessing market pressure towards safety to a solution that imposes legal penalties on smaller and start-up competitors.

Lew Rockwell, "Do Food Makers Want to Kill You?"

The mills, forges, and factories were active in working for the government, while the men who ate the grain and wore the clothing were active in destroying, and not in creating capital. This, to be sure, was war. It is what war means, but it cannot bring prosperity.

William Graham Sumner's first-hand account of the so-called Civil War

The forty year Cold War drained this country of much of its wealth, squandered capital, and wasted the labor of millions, whose lifetime work, whether as a soldier, sailor, or defense worker, was devoted to policing the empire, fighting its brush wars, and making weapons, instead of building up our civilization with things of utility, comfort, and beauty.

H.A. Scott Trask, "Ten Recurring Economic Fallacies, 1774-2004"

Certainly, the late nineteenth century was not an era of laissez-faire, despite the stubborn and persistent myth to the contrary. True, there were few government regulations on business, but high tariffs, railroad subsidies, and the national banking system prove that the government was no neutral bystander. Sumner more accurately termed it the era of plutocracy, in which politically organized wealth used the power of the state for selfish advantage.

H.A. Scott Trask, "Ten Recurring Economic Fallacies, 1774-2004"

Either Keynes knew better and was a purely power-serving demogoge, or Hayek was right when he several times suggested that Keynes was ignorant of the most elementary theorems of economics.

Richard Ebeling

Regulations are a full-employment bill for economists!

Walter Block

When corporations and government work together it is called mercantilism, or fascism, or corporate socialism, or state capitalism, or Reaganomics. But it is not free market capitalism.

Anthony Gregory, "Don't Assume I'm a Socialist!"

The mechanism of the last major bout of inflation was the sale of government debt to commercial banks. In this process, called "monetization," banks or the Fed create the money out of nothing with which to purchase the bonds.[3] This is often referred to as "printing money," although in modern times, the money is usually created electronically rather than through the manufacture of paper notes.

[3] Rothbard The Mystery of Banking, [PDF] explains this process on pages 105-108.

Robert Blumen, "Debt and Delusion"

A society cannot prosper by printing ever-increasing quantities of paper tickets representing claims for real goods and drawing more of the population into trading these tickets back and forth among themselves.

Robert Blumen, "Debt and Delusion"

We cannot all be day traders: someone must produce the goods that are consumed.

Robert Blumen, "Debt and Delusion"

To hold the interest rate below the market-clearing level, the Fed must create whatever amount of money borrowers wish to borrow in order to prevent the natural rise of rates that would occur if credit were restrained by savings.

Robert Blumen, "Debt and Delusion"

When Austrians talk about entrepreneurial activity, they are describing the activity of insightful actors who perceive profit opportunities that others have missed, and are willing to risk their capital to test their ideas.

Robert Blumen, "Debt and Delusion"

Under central banking, financial markets are not real markets, although they are similar enough in appearance to fool a lot of people.

Robert Blumen, "Debt and Delusion"

The very same people who remind us over and over that a person's income is no measure of his or her intrinsic worth, are the ones who complain the loudest over this country's "priorities" when it comes to salaries. But if we are already agreed that a person's salary has no relation to moral worth or social importance, then why is the teacher (or nurse, fire fighter, etc.) entitled to more money than the professional athlete?

Robert Murphy, "What Does Marginality Mean?"

If the money supply were not increased, a sustainable rise in prices would be impossible.

Richard Ebeling, "Monetary Policty without Money"

This is always the economist?s favorite question: "At what cost?"

Gary North, "Five Myths of the Economic Recovery"

Money talks -- even fiat money.

Gary North, "Five Myths of the Economic Recovery"

Thrift is the source of capital. It is the source of future productivity and income. It reveals an attitude toward the future. It is a mark of self-government and personal responsibility.

Gary North, "Five Myths of the Economic Recovery"

If you can't understand price fixing, you can't understand anything in economics. This means you should refrain from holding or expressing any opinions on any economic subject whatsoever!

bkMarcus, "Emergency Price Fixing"

Somehow it always comes back to the foundational insight that trade -- all trade everywhere of whatever type, regardless of political borders or anything else -- is mutually beneficial. If that one insight could be understood and absorbed and fully applied by all people who comment on politics and economics, how much fallacy would the world be spared? At least we would be rid of the idea that somehow making Americans pay vastly more for imported goods only hurts China.

Jeffrey Tucker, "Do only sellers benefit from exchange?"

Consumers are in charge in capitalism, and they want bargains.

Gary North, "Faith in the Stock Market""

Consumption today is an enticing opportunity. But it involves a cost: foregoing future consumption. The corn you eat, you cannot plant.

Gary North, "Faith in the Stock Market""

War is not a form of competition; it is what arises when competition breaks down.

Roderick T. Long, "Viking Style: Model or Misfortune?"

It is only by rejecting his high priest status and embracing his position as a lowly philosopher that the economist has an opportunity to save economics from damnation due to arrogance.

Peter J. Boettke, et al. "The Battle for the Soul of Economics"

Money is the price of wealth, not wealth as such. Wealth is the goods and services money can buy. Increasing the supply of lumber increases our prosperity. Increasing the supply of money raises its price.

George F. Smith, "Myths of the Money Machine"

Although the gold standard could hardly be portrayed as having produced a period of price tranquility, it was the case that the price level in 1929 was not much different, on net, from what it had been in 1800. But, in the two decades following the abandonment of the gold standard in 1933, the consumer price index in the United States nearly doubled. And, in the four decades after that, prices quintupled. Monetary policy, unleashed from the constraint of domestic gold convertibility, had allowed a persistent overissuance of money. As recently as a decade ago, central bankers, having witnessed more than a half-century of chronic inflation, appeared to confirm that a fiat currency was inherently subject to excess.

Remarks by Chairman Alan Greenspan before the Economic Club of New York, December 19, 2002

Saying that central bankers "witnessed" inflation is like saying Nazis witnessed mass executions.

George F. Smith, "Myths of the Money Machine"

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold.... The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

Alan Greenspan, "Gold and Economic Freedom"

People who are poor because they have few employment options are not made better off by reducing what options they have.

Shawn Ritenour, "What You Need to Know About the Minimum Wage"

As you remove employment possibilities for those harmed the most by raises in the minimum wage, their incomes fall, and they will tend to become more poor, not less.

Shawn Ritenour, "What You Need to Know About the Minimum Wage"

Not only does the minimum wage harm the poorest of the working poor immediately, but it also sets them on a lower income trajectory over their lifetime.

Shawn Ritenour, "What You Need to Know About the Minimum Wage"

If mainstream economists had basic understanding of math, they could not believe a word of what they teach.

andy

If a union succeeds in forcing the employers to pay higher wage rates than those they were prepared to pay under the prevailing state of market conditions, this is not a victory for "labor" . . . . It is a boon only for those workers who will be employed at the new rates. It is a calamity for all those whom it condemns to lasting unemployment.

Ludwig von Mises

[Since the Industrial Revolution] we have never heard of famine (the only recent famines have been in Communist China, and earlier, in Soviet Russia). Famine emerges from a lack of inter-local trade; when one locality's food crop fails, since there is virtually no trade with other localities the bulk of the people starve. It is precisely the permeation of the free market throughout the world that has virtually ended this scourge of famine, by permitting trade between areas.

Murray N. Rothbard, "Down With Primitivism"

Why is it that every socialist hates and condemns the exchange relationship -- the supposedly "calculating," "inhuman," relationship where both parties gain? Do they consider it more moral for A to let himself be exploited by B, and for B to exploit A?? For make no mistake, when the socialist condemns A for not giving money to B without receiving anything, material or spiritual, in exchange, he is calling upon A to be a sacrificial animal for the benefit of an exploiting B.

Murray N. Rothbard, "Down With Primitivism"

Hyperinflation is inflation that has burst the bounds of politeness.

Robert Blumen, "Weimar and Wall Street"

Each person decides how much cash to hold, not on the basis of the number of dollars or other units, but on the basis of the amount of purchasing power that they think they will need.

Robert Blumen, "Weimar and Wall Street"

Austria is a state of mind ....

Roderick T. Long

Externalities - Even though the right to a resource may be unambiguously and exclusively assigned and although it may be legally salable, its owner may use the resource in ways that have an adverse physical effect on the use of resources by others. An example of a harmful external effect would be the famous case of an upstream factory polluting the water used by downstream farmers without first obtaining their consent. The case of a beekeeper's honey production being increased when a neighboring landowner plants an apple orchard provides an example of a beneficial external effect. In each instance there is some social cost or benefit -- often called an "externality" -- which was not taken into account by the owner in deciding how to use his property rights; the total costs or benefits caused by his action do not equal the private cost he incurred or the benefit he obtained.

Arthur S. de Vany, et al., "A Property System for Market Allocation of the Electromagnetic Spectrum: A Legal-Economic-Engineering Study" (Arthur S. de Vany, Ross D. Eckert, Charles J. Meyers, Donald J. O'Hara, Richard C. Scott) Stanford Law Review, Vol. 21, No. 6 (Jun., 1969), pp. 1499-1561

Man's physical actions in the world do not change physical laws, nor do his economic actions change economic laws. For example, a price control that obliges suppliers to provide a good without profit or with a less-than-competitive rate of profit, is a comparable affront to natural law as a legislative demand that the producers make the good out of physically impossible materials, such as produce gasoline out of sand instead of crude oil or construct buildings out of air and water instead of steel and concrete. Economic law shows that the good will not continue to be voluntarily supplied under such a price control, just as physical law shows that it cannot physically be produced from such materials.

George Reisman, "Is Laissez-Faire a Threat to Freedom? An Answer to George Soros"

Whoever claims that economic competition represents "survival of the fittest" in the sense of the law of the jungle, provides the clearest possible evidence of his lack of knowledge of economic science.

George Reisman, "Is Laissez-Faire a Threat to Freedom? An Answer to George Soros"

This is why taxes on business and capital are so foolish and counterproductive. Such taxes hamper business investment, which is precisely what raises our standard of living. The vast bulk of high school teachers and college professors spend their time condemning the wickedness of businessmen and the wealthy, and describe taxation as a righteous method for redistributing the supposedly ill-gotten gains of the wealthy to the oppressed poor. To put it kindly, such people have not the faintest idea of how wealth is created, and their envy-driven policy proposals inevitably make society poorer than it would otherwise be.

Thomas E. Woods, Jr., "Forgotten Facts of American Labor History"

Labor historians and activists would doubtless be at a loss to explain why, at a time when unionism was numerically negligible (a whopping three percent of the American labor force was unionized by 1900) and federal regulation all but nonexistent, real wages in manufacturing climbed an incredible 50 percent in the United States from 1860-1890, and another 37 percent from 1890-1914, or why American workers were so much better off than their much more heavily unionized counterparts in Europe. Most of them seem to cope with these inconvenient facts by neglecting to mention them at all.

Thomas E. Woods, Jr., "Forgotten Facts of American Labor History"

When people hear the word 'fascism' they naturally think of its ugly racism and anti-Semitism as practiced by the totalitarian regimes of Mussolini and Hitler. But there was also an economic policy component of fascism, known in Europe during the 1920s and '30s as 'corporatism,' that was an essential ingredient of economic totalitarianism as practiced by Mussolini and Hitler. So-called corporatism was adopted in Italy and Germany during the 1930s and was held up as a 'model' by quite a few intellectuals and policy makers in the United States and Europe. A version of economic fascism was in fact adopted in the United States in the 1930s and survives to this day. In the United States these policies were not called 'fascism' but 'planned capitalism.' The word fascism may no longer be politically acceptable, but its synonym 'industrial policy' is as popular as ever.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo, "Economic Fascism"

Raising Social Security taxes today will not leave a dime more to pay pensions to future retirees. Right now there is more money coming into the system than is going out -- and the difference gets spent on other things. Higher taxes now would mean a bigger excess to be spent on other things, leaving nothing more for the future.

Thomas Sowell, "Random thoughts"

Time and again, over the centuries, price controls have produced three things: shortages, quality deterioration and black markets. Why would anyone want any of those things with pharmaceutical drugs?

Thomas Sowell, "Random thoughts"

What "eminent domain" laws mean in practice is that politicians have a right to seize your property and turn it over to someone else, in order to gain campaign contributions and win votes.

Thomas Sowell, "Random thoughts"

It is amazing how many people think that the government's role is to give them what they want by overriding what other people want.

Thomas Sowell, "Random thoughts"

A check of official records shows that my property line extends farther than I thought -- but laws prevent me from using that additional land. However, I can probably be sued if anyone gets injured while trespassing on it. In other words, I am worse off for owning more land than I thought I had.

Thomas Sowell, "Random thoughts"

If the government gave a $5,000 subsidy to anyone who buys an automobile, do you doubt that the price of automobiles would go up -- perhaps by $5,000? Why then does no one see any connection between government subsidies to college students and rising tuition?

Thomas Sowell, "Random thoughts"

In the free market, capitalist and laborer are roles played within the economy. Under state capitalism, the roles played by individuals become classes of individuals.

bkMarcus, "diseconomies of scale"

Corporate capitalists don't want free markets, they want dependable profits, and their surest route is to crush the competition by controlling the government.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

There is only one cure for poverty: work, savings, investment, capital accumulation, and wealth creation. In a word, capitalism.

Thomas DiLorenzo, "It Depends on What the Meaning of 'Us' Is"

Fact of life: scarce resources are allocated either by money or by time. If you are not in a position to pay the monetary price of some item, you will pay with time. The health care delivery system speeds up the conveyor belt for people who don?t have a feeding tube into their bank accounts.

Gary North, "Unassisted Living on the Cheap"

Here is the question we must ask every monetary reformer: What, legally and economically, will keep the government from printing too much paper money or issuing too much credit? The honesty of the politicians? The good judgment of the bureaucrats in charge of printing money?

Gary North

Increasing the number of green paper tickets in circulation does absolutely nothing to increase the amount of wealth in existence.

Thomas Woods, "Fr. Coughlin and Friends"

The creation of wealth occurs when capital investment allows the same amount of goods to be produced with less labor, thereby freeing up labor for the production of goods that could not otherwise have been produced. This takes real effort and sacrifice, not paper and a printing press.

Thomas Woods, "Fr. Coughlin and Friends"

We consume because we have money to spend. How did we get this money? Because we have been producers, or the heirs of heirs of producers, or the robbers of producers.

Gary North, "Why Are So Many People Pessimistic?"

Americans have a strange notion that the ordinary laws of economics do not apply to them. So doubtless they will think they are prosperous if the boom starts, and that deficits and indebtedness are merely signs of how prosperous they are.

Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943)

Mathematical equations cannot take into account creative human decisions based on the categories of cause and effect, before and after. What they describe is a timeless world of correlations from which causation is absent. Human intentions play no part in the model, as the model assumes all humans know everything relevant to their situation and can only accept it as a given.

Gene Callahan

"Usury" is the "interest on a loan" that the person using the word "usury" doesn't approve of.

Wirkman Virkkala

Just as there are always ways to make money...so are there always ways to spend it. Nature, with her majestic sense of mischief, provides that for every dollar made there arises a dollar's worth of spending that otherwise would not exist. The man who invented double-entry bookkeeping was a genius. For just as you bring nothing into this life, so must you take nothing out. The sum of energy and mass in the universe is always constant. Credits must equal debits; everything must balance out.

Bill Bonner, "Making Money, and Spending"

The childish attempts to provide a basis for "just" action by measuring the relative utilities or satisfactions of different persons simply cannot be taken seriously. ...most economists seem to begin to see that the whole of the so-called "welfare economics", which pretends to base its arguments on inter-personal comparisons of ascertainable utilities, lacts all scientific foundation....The idea of basing coercive actions by government on such fantasies is clearly an absurdity.

F.A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty vol. 3, The Political Order of a Free People, pp. 201-202

Prices rise in an economy for the same reason that they rise in an auction where counterfeiters have showed up to make bids.

Gary North

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