format_quote Quotes
Authoritative sources and quotes to counter economic fallacies with facts.
"In the economic sphere, an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects unfold only subsequently; they are not seen. Between a bad and a good economist, this is the whole difference: one confines himself to the visible effect; the other takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen."
menu_book That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen
View Full QuoteView Full Quote"By property I mean the right that a worker has to the value he has created by his labor."
"When a portion of wealth passes from the person who possesses it, without his consent and without compensation, to anyone who does not possess it, whether by force or by fraud, I say that property is violated, that plunder is committed."
menu_book The Law
View Full Quote"A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both."
menu_book Capitalism and Freedom
View Full Quote"The free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovered for achieving participatory democracy."
menu_book Capitalism and Freedom
View Full Quote"Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power."
menu_book Capitalism and Freedom
View Full QuoteView Full Quote"That's an interesting paradox to think about. Make it legal and it's no good. Why? Because as long as it's illegal the people who come in do not qualify for welfare, they don't qualify for social security, they don't qualify for the other myriad of benefits that we pour out from our left pocket to our right pocket. So long as they don't qualify they migrate to jobs. They take jobs that most residents of this country are unwilling to take. They provide employers with the kind of workers that they cannot get. They're hard workers, they're good workers, and they are clearly better off."
View Full Quote"You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state."
"The inheritance of property is an important factor in maintaining family unity and in providing incentives for accumulation."
menu_book Capitalism and Freedom
View Full QuoteView Full Quote"There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you're doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I'm not so careful about the content of the present, but I'm very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else's money on myself. And if I spend somebody else's money on myself, then I'm sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else's money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else's money on somebody else, I'm not concerned about how much it is, and I'm not concerned about what I get. And that's government."
View Full Quote"I don't believe that we shall ever have good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government. Because we can't take them violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly or round-about way introduce something they can't stop."
"Nothing distinguishes more clearly conditions in a free country from those in a country under arbitrary government than the observance in the former of the great principle known as the Rule of Law."
menu_book Law, Legislation and Liberty
View Full Quote"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."
menu_book Law, Legislation and Liberty
View Full Quote"The task of the theoretician in the realm of economy is above all to teach us to understand concrete phenomena of human economy as exemplifications of a certain regularity in the succession of phenomena, i.e., as exemplifications of laws of phenomena."
menu_book Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences
View Full Quote"Money has not been generated by law. In its origin it is a social, and not a state institution. Sanction by the authority of the state is a notion alien to it."
menu_book On the Origin of Money
View Full Quote"Value is nothing inherent in goods and no property of them, but merely the importance we first attribute to the satisfaction of our needs, and in consequence carry over to economic goods as the exclusive causes of the satisfaction of our needs."
menu_book Principles of Economics
View Full QuoteView Full Quote"If you don't believe it or don't get it, I don't have the time to try to convince you, sorry."