What better time than this middle of summer to recount some great economics quotes and to commend them to our elected and appointed public policy makers for their careful consideration? Ah, no time like the present:
From Thomas Sowell:
“It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club.
“It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not the Federal Aviation Administration.
“It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader.
“Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing ‘compassion’ for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.”
From Frederic Bastiat:
“The profit of one is the profit of the other.”
From Murray Rothbard:
“It is easy to be conspicuously ‘compassionate’ if others are being forced to pay the cost.”
From Ayn Rand:
“People are not embracing collectivism because they have accepted bad economics. They are accepting bad economics because they have embraced collectivism.”
From Jeffrey Tucker:
“Here is a principle to use in all aspects of economics and policy:
“When you find a good or service that is in huge demand but the supply is so limited to the point that the price goes up and up, look for the regulation that is causing it.
“This applies regardless of the sector, whether transportation, gas, education, food, beer or daycare. There is something in the way that is preventing the market from working as it should.
“If you look carefully enough, you will find the hand of the state making the mess in question.”
From Henry Hazlitt:
“The ‘private sector’ of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and the ‘public sector’ is, in fact, the coercive sector.”
From F.A. Hayek:
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
From Ludwig von Mises:
“Economics is a living thing—and to live implies both imperfection and change.”
From Alan Greenspan:
“There are winners and there are losers. And as much as we would like to help the losers, if we do it in the way that directs the limited capital of the society to support the low-productivity parts of the economy, it means that the rest of the economy – our overall standard of living – will not rise as much as it could.”
From Robert Higgs:
“Notwithstanding what some regard as the institutionalization of compassion, the transfer society quashes genuine virtue.
“Redistribution of income by means of government coercion is a form of theft. Its supporters attempt to disguise its essential character by claiming that democratic procedures give it legitimacy, but this justification is specious.
“Theft is theft, whether it be carried out by one thief or by a hundred million thieves acting in concert. And it is impossible to found a good society on the institutionalization of theft.”
And then there are these timeless reminders from Frank Gamrat, executive director at the Allegheny Institute, and Jake Haulk, the think tank’s president-emeritus and current senior adviser:
“Pennsylvania must adopt policies that promote strong economic growth and move away from its fealty to public sector unions and its regulatory environment that hamstring businesses,” Haulk and Gamrat say.
Among those policies:
- Adopt right-to-work legislation to encourage business investment in the commonwealth
- Eliminate teacher and transit strikes
- Reform public pensions by mandating 401(k) saving plans for all new hires (at a minimum)
- Reform the binding arbitration law that historically favors organized labor in contract negotiations
- Eliminate the prevailing wage law that can increase public works project costs by a quarter or more
- Require periodic real estate reassessments by all counties with a maximum allowable number of years between assessments
- Better facilitate the construction of natural gas pipelines which will speed more product to market and increase drilling activity and gas industry jobs.
- Lower the corporate net income tax rate.
Also said Hayek, the late Austrian School economist:
“We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.”
Pennsylvania policymakers – local, regional and statewide — would be wise to learn from their recidivist economics foolishness and enact policies that promote real and sustainable growth for the commonwealth’s net benefit.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
