It is true that a competitive market is not the whole of society. A great deal depends on the qualities of the population and the nation in how they organize the non-market aspects of society.
The price works so well, so efficiently, that we are not aware of it most of the time.
The preservation of liberty, not the promotion of efficiency, is the primary justification for private property. Efficiency is a happy, though not accidental, by-product – and a most important by-product because liberty could not have survived if it had not also produced affluence.
There have been unions based on gold or silver, but not on fiat money – money tempted to inflate – put out by politically independent entities.
To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them.
The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus.
It’s a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don’t approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else.
Unfortunately, unanimity is not always feasible.
The euro is going to be a big source of problems, not a source of help.
Every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that’s a different question. He’s always the special case. He ought to get special privileges from the government, a tariff, this, that and the other thing.
The evidence of history speaks with a single voice. I do not know any exception to the proposition that if you compare like with like, the freer the system, the better off the ordinary poor people have been.
Never try to walk across a river just because it has an average depth of four feet.
Economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems.
The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.
A society based on the freedom to choose is better than a society based on the principles of socialism, communism and coercion.
The Soviet experience was much worse than experts in the West had thought. That discovery had a tremendous impact both on the intellectual community and on the public at large.
Society doesn’t have values. People have values.
We economists don’t know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can’t sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly you’ll have a tomato shortage. It’s the same with oil or gas.
He moves fastest who moves alone.
World trade depends on differences among countries, not similarities. Different countries are in different stages of development. It is appropriate for them to have different patterns, different policies for ecology, labor standards, and so forth.