Quotes

"The more stabilization, the less stability."

"In spite of its alluring name, the welfare state stands or falls by compulsion. It is compulsion imposed upon us with the state's power to punish noncompliance. Once this is clear, it is equally clear that the welfare state is an evil the same as each and every restriction of freedom."

"[Inter-war interventions were a] policy that created chaos in the name of planning, confusion in the name of guidance, retrogression and autarky in the name of progress, and mass poverty in the name of justice."

"The center of gravity in the responsibility for people's lives should be shifted from the state back to where it belongs by all standards of common sense and historical experience - to the individual surrounded by his family, to free organizations, to the broad masses of the people themselves."

"[Keynesian/interventionist] economic policy would thus, indeed, attain the dignity of engineering, without regard to the fact that society can never be made into a machine nor can statistics succeed morality as a guide to behavior or policy."

"And in order to refloat the economy whose functioning has been so largely impaired by past interventions, those same critics of capitalism clamor for more interventions, more planning, and hence a further emasculation of our economy. It is as though one poured sand into an engine and then hoped to start it up again by pouring in more sand."

"They will come to learn in the end, at their own expense, that it is better to endure competition for rich customers than to be invested with monopoly over impoverished customers."

"Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone."

"We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork."

"The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy."