There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.
I stand for the values of freedom, not just the practical benefits. Even if free market economics was not the most efficient system, I'd still be in favor of it because of the human values it represents of choice, challenge, and risk.
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.
Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
I think it's really disgraceful that the Republican Party, which preaches holding down the size of government, should have been, and the Bush administration should have been, such a big spender.
I have found no reason whatsoever for having a public school system. You would have a better educational system—elementary and secondary system, if the government were not involved.
Industrial progress, mechanical improvement, all of the great wonders of the modern era have meant relatively little to the wealthy.
The rich in Ancient Greece would have benefited hardly at all from modern plumbing: running servants replaced running water. Television and radio? The Patricians of Rome could enjoy the leading musicians and actors in their home, could have the leading actors as domestic retainers. Ready-to-wear clothing, supermarkets—all these and many other modern developments would have added little to their life.
The great achievements of Western Capitalism have redounded primarily to the benefit of the ordinary person. These achievements have made available to the masses conveniences and amenities that were previously the exclusive prerogative of the rich and powerful.
The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.
We cannot expect existing businesses to promote legislation that would harm them. It is up to the rest of us to promote the public interest by fostering competition across the board and to recognize that being pro-free enterprise may sometimes require that we be anti-existing business.
A society that puts equality ahead of freedom...will end up with neither.
The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.
Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.
President Kennedy said, "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country."... Neither half of that statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society.
