bkmarcus.com : quotes : freeMarket

The free market may not do what you want it to do, but its failure to satisfy your requirements is not a market failure.

It's not a market failure if you can't find someone to give you saxophone lessons for less than $8 an hour.

Allen Thornton, Laws of the Jungle

Libertarianism is rejected by the modern left -- which preaches individualism but practices collectivism.

Capitalism is rejected by the modern right -- which preaches enterprise but practices protectionism.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

It was European conservatives who, apparently fearful of the openness of the Industrial Revolution (why, anyone could get rich!), struck the first blows at capitalism by encouraging and accepting laws that made the disruptions of innovation and competition less frequent and eased the way for the comforts and collusions of cartelization.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

Big business in America today and for some years has been openly at war with competition and, thus, at war with laissez-faire capitalism. Big business supports a form of state capitalism in which government and big business act as partners.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

The right, meantime, blissfully defends big business as though it had not, in fact, become just the sort of bureaucratic, authoritarian force that rightists reflexively attack when it is governmental.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

The reactionary tendencies of both liberals and conservatives today show clearly in their willingness to cede, to the state or the community, power far beyond the protection of liberty against violence. For differing purposes, both see the state as an instrument not protecting man's freedom but either instructing or restricting how that freedom is to be used.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

To the conservative, all too often, the alternatives are social conformity or unthinkable chaos.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

Personally, I believe I would have a better chance of surviving -- and certainly my values would have a better chance of surviving -- with a Watts, Chicago, Detroit, or Washington in flames than with an entire nation snug in a garrison.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

The current laws against marijuana, in contravention even of all available evidence regarding its nature, are a prime example of the use of political power. The very power that makes it possible for the state to ban marijuana, and to arrest Lenny Bruce, is the same power that makes it possible for the state to exact taxes from one man to pay into the pockets of another.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

To suppose that anyone needs government protection from the creation of monopolies is to accept two suppositions: that monopoly is the natural direction of unregulated enterprise, and that technology is static.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

This is not to say that economic bigness is bad. It isn't, if it results from economic efficiency. But it is bad if it results from collusion with political, rather than with economic power.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

There is no monopoly in the world today ... that might not be seriously challenged by competition, were it not for some form of protective government license, tariff, subsidy, or regulation.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

Also, there isn't the tiniest shred of evidence to suggest that the trend of unregulated business and industry is toward monopoly. In fact, the trend seems in the opposite direction, toward diversification and decentralization.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

If commercial activity were unregulated and absolutely unsubsidized, it could depend upon only one factor for success -- pleasing customers.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

Conservatives are at least consistent in this matter. They feel that the state (which they sometimes call "the community") can and must protect people from unsavory thoughts. It goes without saying who defines unsavory: the political -- or community-leaders, of course.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

There is no traditional conservative who is fit to even walk on the same level with Lenny Bruce in his fierce devotion to individualism.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

An irate parent who attempted to hustle a smut peddler off the street, as a matter of fact, should be sued, not saluted.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

Conservatives and liberals alike hold in common the mystical notion that nations really mean something, probably something permanent. Both ascribe to lines drawn on maps -- or in the dirt or in the air -- the magical creation of communities of men that require sovereignty and sanction.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

The liberal says that far from ending nationhood, he wants to expand it, make it world-wide, to create a proliferation of mini- and micronations in the name of ethnic and cultural preservation, and then to erect a great super-bureaucracy to supervise all the petty bureaucracies.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

The States' rights lapse is simply that conservatives who would deny to the Federal government certain controls over people, eagerly cede exactly the same controls to smaller administrative units. They say that the smaller units are more effective. This means that conservatives support the coercion of individuals at the most effective level. It certainly doesn't mean that they oppose coercion.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

In failing to resist state segregation and miscegenation laws, in failing to resist laws maintaining racially inequitable spending of tax money, simply because these laws were passed by states, conservatives have failed to fight the very bureaucracy that they supposedly hate -- at the very level where they might have stopped it first.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

What, actually, can government do for black people in America that black people could not do better for themselves, if they were permitted the freedom to do so? I can think of nothing.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

If cities cannot exist on the basis of the skills, energy and creativity of the people who live, work or invest in them, then they should not be sustained by people who do not live in them.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

Find someone who will rebel against public-education laws and you will have a worthy rebel indeed. Find someone who just rants in favor of getting more liberals, or more conservatives, onto the school board, and you will have found a politically oriented, passe man -- a plastic rebel.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

Or, in the blackest neighborhood, find the plumber who will thumb his nose at city hall's restrictive licenses and certificates and you will have found a freedom fighter of far greater consequence than the window breaker.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

... politics is just another form of residual magic in our culture -- a belief that somehow things come from nothing; that things may be given to some without first taking them from others; that all the tools of man's survival are his by accident or divine right and not by pure and simple inventiveness and work.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

Politics has always been the institutionalized and established way in which some men have exercised the power to live off the output of other men.

Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969

To the free market, we owe all our material prosperity, all leisure time, our health and longevity, our huge and growing population, nearly everything we call life itself. Capitalism and capitalism alone has rescued the human race from degrading poverty, rampant sickness, and early death.

Lew Rockwell, Speaking of Liberty, p. 29

In any case, as with the gold standard, it might be said that advocating privatization is politically unrealistic and therefore a waste of time. What's more, we might say that by continuing to harp on the issue, we only marginalize ourselves, proving that we are on the fringe. Again, I submit that there is no better way to assure that an issue will always be off the table than to stop talking about it.

Lew Rockwell, Speaking of Liberty, p. 60

The free-market economy has a record like no other of offering economic advancement for everyone no matter what his station in life. However, it does not offer equality of result or even equality of opportunity. The free market offers not a classless society, but something of much greater value: liberty itself.

Lew Rockwell, Speaking of Liberty, p. 111

In all of human history, philosophers have sought to find a system of social organization that truly embodies the will of the people. With the market economy, we have that system.

Lew Rockwell, Speaking of Liberty, p. 280

Critics of the free market are therefore the Wile E. Coyotes of our day: sitting on the stool in comfort, they systematically saw away at the legs beneath them, on the absurd assumption that they will be able to hang in the air indefinitely after their work is done.

Gary North

I make no apologies for being a champion of prosperity and its source, the free-market economy.

Lew Rockwell, Words in Defense of Liberty

If private property is secure, we can count on all other aspects of society to be free and prosperous.

Lew Rockwell, Words in Defense of Liberty

In defense against these half-truths, free market advocates must be ready to force advocates of government policies (including regulations, which are disguised tax and expenditure packages) to justify them on their actual merits, rather than on the basis of a misleading "shopping list" of alleged benefits.

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

The last thing most businessmen want is a free market, where they must compete, slash prices, continuously innovate, suffer narrow profit margins and live constantly on the edge of bankruptcy. They would much rather have assured profits, monopoly positions, price supports, trade protection and the other trappings of a corporate welfare state.

Bruce Bartlett, "Free market doesn't mean pro-business"

Licenses, by definition, are market entry barriers that enable license holders to obtain scarcity rents they couldn't have on the free market.

Kevin Carson

It is something of a philosophical puzzle to decipher what is meant by the word 'social', though it is used confidently enough to suggest that it has a clear meaning. One key to understanding policy and politics in most European countries is to take it that 'social' indicates that the matter in hand imperatively demands a political decision to override any market solution that would otherwise emerge.

Anthony de Jasay

Freedom of trade is really a very simple concept. Each individual should be at liberty to buy from and sell to whomever he wishes on mutually agreed-upon terms. Whether the partners to this trade live next door to each other or are separated by thousands of miles should make absolutely no difference to the logic of the idea.

Richard M. Ebeling, "Globalization and Free Trade"

Thus long before the deposition of the last western emperor in 476, the de facto free market of the ancient Mediterranean had been replaced by a frozen society. With its secret police, branded workers, and coercive family legislation, Rome was the first totalitarian state.

Nicholas Davidson, The Ancient Suicide of the West

If ancapistan turned anti-capitalist, I probably wouldn't notice. I believe that without a State capitalism and socialism are harmonious and non-conflicting. Sure, you may call it a syndical or mutual, while I call it a firm with restricted transfer of ownership. You may call it a commune while I call it a household. Whatever.

"Hogeye Bill" Horton

What goes by the name of "free trade" is actually managed trade manipulated through a variety of international organizations controlled by the governments of the world.

Richard M. Ebeling, "1914 and the World We Lost"

Socialism produced political monsters like Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung, and led to unheard-of crimes against humanity in all communist states. The destruction of Russia and Kampuchea, the humiliation of the Chinese and Eastern European people, are not "distortions of socialism" as the defenders of this doctrine would like to convince us: they are inevitable consequences of the destruction of the market which started with an attempt to replace the economic decisions of free individuals by the "wisdom of the planners."

Yuri N. Maltsev, former economic advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev

The case for free trade may be counter-intuitive, and it doesn't lend itself to sound bites. No wonder it gets battered at election time.

Sheldon Richman, The Season of Protectionism

Communism can be defined as the longest route from capitalism to capitalism.

a bitter quip pervading Eastern Europe during the revolutionary year of 1989

Libertarians don't believe the free market is a god-like panacea, only that it is by far the best and most humane economic system possible in the real world, and that central planning always leads to disaster and human suffering.

Anthony Gregory, All We Have To Lose Are Our Parking Tickets!"

No one who champions free markets is opposed to anyone earning a high income. The real issue is not income levels per se, but whether income is primarily a function of free productivity or government-enforced artificial scarcity.

Dale Steinreich, "Real Medical Freedom"

If Halliburton were cut off the government payroll, I have no doubt that many of its intellectual and physical resources could be profitably employed in a genuine market setting. Let's forget about privatizing the warfare state and privatize Halliburton instead. Let it, and all its far-flung clients the world over, sink or swim in a genuine free-market economy. At that point, we'll raise a glass to its profitability. Until then, it deserves all the disdain ever heaped on any able-bodied welfare cheat.

Lew Rockwell, "Government Contractors versus Real Business"

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