Free Enterprise Quotes

• Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, and navigation, the four pillars of our prosperity, are the most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Agriculture, Liberty, Four

  Thomas Jefferson, Richard Holland Johnston, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson”

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• I believe that without free enterprise there can be no democracy.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Believe, Democracy, Enterprise

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• A virtue of the free enterprise system is that it offers every individual the greatest opportunity for self expression.

  Lawrence Fertig

  Opportunity, Self, Expression

  Lawrence Fertig (1961). “Prosperity through freedom”

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• So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free-enterprise system.

  Milton Friedman

  Government, People, Ordinary

  "The Phil Donahue Show", www.youtube.com. 1979.

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• There's no limit to what free men and free women in a free market with free enterprise can accomplish when people are free to follow their dream.

  Jack Kemp

  Dream, Men, People

  "Is Jack Kemp Mr. Right?" by Maureen Dowd, www.nytimes.com. June 28, 1987.

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• Americans chose a free enterprise system designed to provide a quality of opportunity, not compel a quality of results. And that is why this is only place in the world where you can open up a business in the spare bedroom of your home.

  Marco Rubio

  Home, Opportunity, Quality

  Speech at the Conservative Political Action Committee conference at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, voices.washingtonpost.com. February 18, 2010.

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• That's free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing - the truly democratic thing about it - is that you don't even have to be a player to lose.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Freedom, Player, Democracy

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• Every nation on the Earth that embraces market economics and the free enterprise system is pulling millions of its people out of poverty. The free enterprise system creates prosperity, not denies it.

  Marco Rubio

  People, Earth, Poverty

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• The whole global warming thing is created to destroy America's free enterprise system and our economic stability.

  Jerry Falwell

  Organization, America, Sick

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• A free-enterprise economy depends only on markets, and according to the most advanced mathematical macroeconomic theory, markets depend only on moods: specifically, the mood of the men in the pinstripes, also known as the Boys on the Street. When the Boys are in a good mood, the market thrives; when they get scared or sullen, it is time for each one of us to look into the retail apple business.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Boys, Men, Apples

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• There are some things in the world we can't change- gravity, entropy, the speed of light, and our biological nature that requires clean air, clean water, clean soil, clean energy and biodiversity for our health and well-being. Protecting the biosphere should be our highest priority or else we sicken and die. Other things, like capitalism, free enterprise, the economy, currency, the market, are not forces of nature, we invented them. They are not immutable and we can change them. It makes no sense to elevate economics above the biosphere.

  David Suzuki

  Light, Air, Water

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• Entrepreneurial profit is the expression of the value of what the entrepreneur contributes to production.

  Joseph A. Schumpeter

  Expression, Entrepreneur, Profit

  Joseph A. Schumpeter (2011). “The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest, and the Business Cycle”, p.153, Transaction Publishers

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• We must win the war on poverty by enlisting the greatest weapon ever invented - free enterprise

  Jack Kemp

  War, Winning, Enlisting

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• 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

  Invisible Hand, People, Competition

  An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations vol. 1, bk. 1, ch. 10 (1776)

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• The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Economic, Economy, States

  John Kenneth Galbraith (1987). “Economics in Perspective: A Critical History”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I believe that the free enterprise system is the greatest engine of prosperity the world's ever known.

  Barack Obama

  Believe, World, Prosperity

  Second presidential debate, www.foxnews.com. October 16, 2012.

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• Free enterprise has enabled the creative and the acquisitive urges of man to be given expression in a way which benefits all members of society. Let free enterprise fight back now, not for itself, but for all those who believe in freedom.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Believe, Fighting, Men

  Margaret Thatcher, Iain Dale (1997). “As I said to Denis--: the Margaret Thatcher book of quotations”, Robson Book Ltd

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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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  While I am a great believer in the free enterprise system and all that it entails, I am an even stronger believer in the right of our people to live in a clean and pollution-free environment.

  Barry Goldwater

  People, Stronger, Environment

  Barry Morris Goldwater (1970). “The conscience of a majority”, Prentice Hall

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• Gore Vidal, the American writer, once described the American economic system as 'free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich'. Macroeconomic policy on the global scale is a bit like that. It is Keynesianism for the rich countries and monetarism for the poor.

  Ha-Joon Chang

  Country, Rich Countries, Socialism

  Ha-Joon Chang (2007). “Bad Samaritans: rich nations, poor policies, and the threat to the developing world”, Century

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• The free enterprise concept inherent in the economic model of capitalism should mean common people, or lower and middle class wage-earners, have greater potential to rise up and gain financial independence. In reality, however, free enterprise all too often leads to an almost total lack of government regulation that in turn allows the global elite to run amuck in Gordon Gecko-style financial coups.

  James Morcan

  Running, Mean, Reality

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• Free enterprise makes people prosperous, all people prosperous, and big government makes people poorer.

  Marco Rubio

  Government, People, Bigs

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• The great virtue of free enterprise is that it forces existing businesses to meet the test of the market continuously, to produce products that meet consumer demands at lowest cost, or else be driven from the market. It is a profit-and-loss system. Naturally, existing businesses generally prefer to keep out competitors in other ways. That is why the business community, despite its rhetoric, has so often been a major enemy of truly free enterprise.

  Milton Friedman

  Business, Loss, Community

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• A program whose basic thesis is, not that the system of free enterprise for profit has failed in this generation, but that it has not yet been tried!

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Wisdom, This Generation, Generations

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• Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business, frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite.

  Ronald Reagan

  Government, Self, Competition

  Ronald Reagan, Michael Reagan (2016). “The Last Best Hope: The Greatest Speeches of Ronald Reagan”, p.62, Humanix Books

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