Explaining Conservative Economics in 40 Quotes

In a world where the Left keeps putting forth increasingly insane economic ideas like taxing unrealized capital gains and putting price controls on food, it’s a good idea to talk about sound, conservative economic principles. If you want to understand how conservatives view economics, these quotes will give you a very good handle on it. Enjoy!

1) “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” — Author unknown

2) “Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone.” — Frédéric Bastiat

3) “Don’t look in other people’s pockets. You have no business there. What they earn is theirs. What you earn is yours. Keep it that way. Nobody owes you anything, except to respect your privacy and leave you the hell alone.” — Neal Boortz

4) “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” — Winston Churchill

5) “I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.” — Benjamin Franklin

6) “The great danger to the consumer is the monopoly – whether private or governmental. His most effective protection is free competition at home and free trade throughout the world. The consumer is protected from being exploited by one seller by the existence of another seller from whom he can buy and who is eager to sell to him. Alternative sources of supply protect the consumer far more effectively than all the Ralph Naders of the world.” — Milton Friedman

7) “Economists may not know much. But we know one thing very well: how to produce surpluses and shortages. Do you want a surplus? Have the government legislate a minimum price that is above the price that would otherwise prevail. That is what we have done at one time or another to produce surpluses of wheat, of sugar, of butter, of many other commodities. Do you want a shortage? Have the government legislate a maximum price that is below the price that would otherwise prevail.” — Milton Friedman

8) “I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.” — Milton Friedman

9) “Consumers don't produce inflation. Producers don't produce inflation. Inflation is produced only by too much government spending and too much government creation of money, and nothing else.” — Milton Friedman

10) “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.” — Milton Friedman

11) “A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.” — F.A. Hayek

12) “Either immediately or ultimately every dollar of government spending must be raised through a dollar of taxation. Once we look at the matter. In this way, the supposed miracles of government spending will appear in another light.” — Henry Hazlitt

13) “The larger the percentage of the national income taken by taxes the greater the deterrent to private production and employment. When the total tax burden grows beyond a bearable size, the problem of devising taxes that will not discourage and disrupt production becomes insoluble.” — Henry Hazlitt

14) “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” — Robert Heinlein

15) “The prudent capitalist will never adventure his capital… if there exists a state of uncertainty as to whether the government will repeal tomorrow what it has enacted today.” — William Henry Harrison

16) “Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.” — Thomas Jefferson

17) “A rising tide (in the economy) lifts all boats.” — John Kennedy

18) “The basic idea behind the relationship between tax rates and tax revenues is that changes in tax rates have two effects on revenues: the arithmetic effect and the economic effect. The arithmetic effect is simply that if tax rates are lowered, tax revenues (per dollar of tax base) will be lowered by the amount of the decrease in the rate. The reverse is true for an increase in tax rates. The economic effect, however, recognizes the positive impact that lower tax rates have on work, output, and employment–and thereby the tax base–by providing incentives to increase these activities. Raising tax rates has the opposite economic effect by penalizing participation in the taxed activities. The arithmetic effect always works in the opposite direction from the economic effect. Therefore, when the economic and the arithmetic effects of tax-rate changes are combined, the consequences of the change in tax rates on total tax revenues are no longer quite so obvious.” — Arthur Laffer explains the concept underlying the Laffer Curve

19) “What pays under capitalism is satisfying the common man, the customer. The more people you satisfy, the better for you.” — Ludwig Von Mises

20) “With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to healthcare, you have to realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.” — Rand Paul

21) "When the federal government spends more each year than it collects in tax revenues, it has three choices: It can raise taxes, print money, or borrow money. While these actions may benefit politicians, all three options are bad for average Americans.” — Ron Paul

22) “The most sinister of all taxes is the inflation tax and it is the most regressive. It hits the poor and the middle class. When you destroy a currency by creating money out of thin air to pay the bills, the value of the dollar goes down, and people get hit with a higher cost of living. It's the middle class that's being wiped out. It is most evil of all taxes.” — Ron Paul

23) “Don’t knock the rich. When did a poor person ever give you a job?” — Laurence J. Peter

24) “The best way to help your neighbor is not to live off your neighbor.” — Alfonzo Rachel

25) “America’s abundance was created not by public sacrifices to ‘the common good,’ but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America’s industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance–and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.” — Ayn Rand

26) “Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion – when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed.” — Ayn Rand

27) “We don’t have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven’t taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much.” — Ronald Reagan (PS: The principle is still the same, but the size of the debt is now 35 trillion dollars.)

28) “Millions of individuals making their own decisions in the marketplace will always allocate resources better than any centralized government planning process." — Ronald Reagan

29) “Companies are not charitable enterprises: They hire workers to make profits.” — Paul Samuelson

30) “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” — Adam Smith

31) “Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality.” — Adam Smith

32) “Four things have almost invariably followed the imposition of controls to keep prices below the level they would reach under supply and demand in a free market: (1) increased use of the product or service whose price is controlled, (2) Reduced supply of the same product or service, (3) quality deterioration, (4) black markets.” — Thomas Sowell

33) “It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication, and a government bureaucracy to administer it.” — Thomas Sowell

34) “The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.” — Thomas Sowell

35) “In a small town, an idiot breaks a shop window. He’s called a vandal until someone points out that a window installer now must be paid to replace the window. The window installer then will have enough money to buy a new suit. A tailor will then be able to buy a new desk. And so on. The whole town apparently gains from the economic activity generated by the broken window. Of course, if this made sense, cities should hire people to run through town, breaking windows. But it doesn’t make sense. It’s a fallacy because the circulating money is seen; what is not seen is what would have been done with the money if the window were still whole. The shopkeeper, instead of paying the window installer, might have expanded his business or bought a new suit or a new desk. The town is worse off because of a broken window.” — John Stossel

36) “A thousand restaurants close every month. They re-open, and that’s good for America. Nobody’s rescuing them. They employ people, too. If we let them go bankrupt, the factories don’t go away, the creative people don’t go away. They get employed more productively by others.” — John Stossel

37) “I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There’s no such thing as entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation.” — Margaret Thatcher

38) “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.” — Margaret Thatcher

39) “Suppose I hire you to repair my computer. The job is worth $200 to me and doing the job is worth $200 to you. The transaction will occur because we have a meeting of the mind. Now suppose there’s the imposition of a 30 percent income tax on you. That means you won’t receive $200 but instead $140. You might say the heck with working for me – spending the day with your family is worth more than $140. You might then offer that you’ll do the job if I pay you $285. That way your after-tax earnings will be $200 – what the job was worth to you. There’s a problem. The repair job was worth $200 to me, not $285. So it’s my turn to say the heck with it. This simple example demonstrates that one effect of taxes is that of eliminating transactions, and hence jobs.” — Walter Williams

40) “How many times have we heard ‘free tuition,’ ‘free healthcare,’ and free you-name-it? If a particular good or service is truly free, we can have as much of it as we want without the sacrifice of other goods or services. Take a ‘free’ library; is it really free? The answer is no. Had the library not been built, that $50 million could have purchased something else. That something else sacrificed is the cost of the library. While users of the library might pay a zero price, zero price and free are not one and the same. So when politicians talk about providing something free, ask them to identify the beneficent Santa Claus or tooth fairy.” — Walter Williams

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