"You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer."

Winston Churchill


"The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another."

Milton Friedman


"The "private sector" of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and ... the "public sector" is, in fact, the coercive sector."

Henry Hazlitt, in "Reflections at 70," a speech delivered to friends in 1964 on his 70th birthday

"If ignorance paid dividends, most Americans could make a fortune out of what they don't know about economics."

Luther H. Hodges


"One hundred dollars invested at 7% interest for 100 years will become $100,000, at which 
time it will be worth absolutely nothing."

Lazarus Long

"You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money."

P.J. O'Rourke

"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."

P.J. O'Rourke

"The Tenth Commandment sends a message to socialists, to egalitarians, to people obsessed with fairness, to American presidential candidates in the year 2000-to everyone who believes that wealth should be redistributed. And the message is clear and concise: Go to hell."

P.J. O'Rourke, Eat the Rich

".......the poor of the world cannot be made rich by redistribution of wealth. Poverty can't be eliminated by punishing people who've escaped poverty, taking their money and giving it as a reward to people who have failed to escape. Economic leveling doesn't work. Whether we call it Marxism, Progressive Reform, or Clintonomics, the result is the same slide into the stygian pit. Communists worship Satan; socialists think perdition is a good system run by bad men; and liberals want us to go to hell because it's warm there in the winter."

P.J. O'Rourke, All the Trouble in the World, p.15


"Among the most urgent political priorities of our age is the separation of economy and state."

Lew Rockwell


"Lunches don't get free just because you don't see the prices on the menu. And economists don't get popular by reminding people of that."

Thomas Sowell

"The first rule of economics is that there is an infinite number of desires chasing a finite number of goods, services and resources. The first rule of politics is to ignore the first rule of economics."

Thomas Sowell

"The dominant orthodoxy in development economics was that Third World countries were trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty that could be broken only by massive foreign aid from the more prosperous industrial nations of the world.  This was in keeping with a more general vision on the Left that people were essentially divided into three categories -- the heartless, the helpless, and wonderful people like themselves, who would rescue the helpless by playing Lady Bountiful with the taxpayers' money."

Thomas Sowell

"The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."

Thomas Sowell


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