Famous quotes by Economists

"People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything"

"It might be said that it is the ideal of the employer to have production without employees and the ideal of the employee is to have income without work"

"Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty"

"The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best"

"There are few things more dishonorable than misleading the young"

"The real minimum wage is zero"

"If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today"

"Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?"

"You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need"

"The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology"

"The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is"

"Never let an inventor run a company. You can never get him to stop tinkering and bring something to market"

"Many people love in themselves what they hate in others"

"Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility"

"If, however, economic ambitions are good servants, they are bad masters"

"I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said"

"Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country"

"The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them"

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

"Tariffs that save jobs in the steel industry mean higher steel prices, which in turn means fewer sales of American steel products around the world and losses of far more jobs than are saved"

"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing"

"The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive"

"Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens"

"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it"

"Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated"

"People who identify themselves as conservatives donate money to charity more often than people who identify themselves as liberals. They donate more money and a higher percentage of their incomes"

"People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do"

"One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring"

"One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them"

"Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats"