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