Economics Quotes - Page 12

• The greatest productive force is human selfishness.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Liberty, Selfishness, Libertarian

  Robert A. Heinlein (1987). “Time Enough for Love”, p.325, Penguin

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• A traffic jam is a collision between free enterprise and socialism. Free enterprise produces automobiles faster than socialism can build roads and road capacity.

  Andrew Joseph Galambos

  Liberty, Jam, Libertarian

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• What pays under capitalism is satisfying the common man, the customer. The more people you satisfy, the better for you.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Men, People, Liberty

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• He who disdains the fall in infant mortality and the gradual disappearance of famines and plagues may cast the first stone upon the materialism of the economists.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Fall, Liberty, May

  Ludwig von Mises (2016). “Human Action”, p.241, Lulu Press, Inc

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• Asking liberals where wages and prices come from is like asking six-year-olds where babies come from.

  Thomas Sowell

  Baby, Years, Liberty

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• The desire of businessmen for profits is what drives prices down unless forcibly prevented from engaging in price competition, usually by governmental activity.

  Thomas Sowell

  Competition, Desire, Liberty

  Thomas Sowell (1996). “Knowledge And Decisions”, p.225, Basic Books

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• We cannot restore traditional American freedom unless we limit the government's power to tax. No tinkering with this, that, or the other law will stop the trend toward socialism. We must repeal the Sixteenth Amendment.

  Frank Chodorov

  Government, Law, Liberty

  Frank Chodorov (2007). “Income Tax: Root of All Evil”, p.10, Ludwig von Mises Institute

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• I have long aspired to make our company a noble prototype of industry, penetrating in science, reliable in engineering, creative in aesthetics and wholesomely prosperous in economics.

  Edwin Land

  Science, Engineering, Long

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• What good does the theory [of economics] do if it is not working for people?

  Muhammad Yunus

  People, Doe, Poverty

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• The things best to know are first principles and causes, but these things are perhaps the most difficult for men to grasp, for they are farthest removed from the senses.

  Aristotle

  Ignorance, Men, Principles

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• I am not sure of anything, I know nothing . . . can you imagine that I don't even know the date of my own death?

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Ignorance, Imagine, Not Sure

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• Greenspan, who knew so much more than most, knew far less than most supposed.

  Alan Greenspan

  Ignorance

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• Regulators have not been able to achieve the level of future clarity required to act pre-emptively. The problem is not lack of regulation but unrealistic expectations. What we confront in reality is uncertainty, some of it frighteningly so...

  Alan Greenspan

  Ignorance, Reality, Expectations

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• Social Science, is not a 'gay science' but rueful, which finds the secret of this universe in 'supply and demand' and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone. Not a 'gay science', no, a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, the dismal science

  Thomas Carlyle

  Ignorance, Gay, Men

  Thomas Carlyle (2014). “The Selected Works of Thomas Carlyle”, p.472, Lulu.com

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• Without an acquaintance with chemistry, the statesman must remain a stranger to the true vital interests of the state, to the means of its organic development and improvement; ... The highest economic or material interests of a country, the increased and more profitable production of food for man and animals, ... are most closely linked with the advancement and diffusion of the natural sciences, especially of chemistry.

  Justus von Liebig

  Country, Knowledge, Mean

  Justus von Liebig (1859). “Familiar Letters on Chemistry, in its relation to Physiology, Dietetics, Agriculture, Commerce and Political Economy: Edited by John Blyth”, p.21

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• Economics has been incurably growth-oriented and addicted to everybody growing richer, even at the cost of exhaustion of resources and pollution of the environment.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Addiction, Growth, Cost

  Kenneth E. Boulding (1985). “Collected Papers: Toward the Twenty-First Century : Political Economy, Social Systems, and World Peace”, University Press of Colorado

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• Humble, honest, ignorance is one of the finest flowers of the human spirit

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Flower, Humble, Ignorance

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• How about no income tax at all on people over 65? People would continue working, remain healthier, not be an economic and social drain on society. Then the elderly would also have more disposable income to help charitable activities.

  John Templeton

  Optimistic, Elderly, People

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• We are seeing the birth of a new perspective of the world, where ecology and economics are two sides of the same coin.

  Leif Johansson

  Two Sides, Perspective, Society

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• Economic advance is not the same thing as human progress.

  John Clapham

  Progress, Society, Environmental

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• Having a little inflation is like being a little pregnant.

  Leon Henderson

  Pregnancy, Littles, Inflation

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• Some years ago John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in an essay on his efforts at writing a history of economics: 'As one approaches the present, one is filled with a sense of hopelessness; in a year and possibly even a month, there is now more economic comment in the supposedly serious literature than survives from the whole of the thousand years commonly denominated as the Middle Ages ... anyone who claims to be familiar with it all is a confessing liar.' I believe that all physicists would subscribe to the same sentiments regarding their own professional literature. I do at any rate.

  Abraham Pais

  Liars, Believe, Writing

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• We must show that liberty is not merely one particular value but that it is the source and condition of most moral values. What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free. We can therefore not fully appreciate the value of freedom until we know how a society of free men as a whole differs from one in which unfreedom prevails.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Men, Appreciate, Individuality

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• In keeping Americans ill-educated, ill-informed and constitutionally ignorant, the education establishment has been the politician's major and most faithful partner. It is in this sense that American education can be deemed a success.

  Walter E. Williams

  Faithful, Ignorant, Liberty

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• There are only two (major) parties today: The Stupid Party and The Evil Party. Once in a while the two parties get together to do something that is both stupid and evil, and that's called Bipartisanship.

  Thomas Woods

  Stupid, Party, Government

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