And now, a truncated collection of wonderfully important public policy quotes, as compiled by economist David L. Bahnsen for this 2021 book, “There’s No Free Lunch: 250 Economic Truths,” that we commend for every public policy maker within the sound of our keyboard to consider.
This cutdown was aggregated by Jonathan Miltimore, the former senior creative strategist at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE):
- “The farmer and manufacturer can no more live without profit than the labourer without wages.” (David Ricardo).
- “The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.” (Thomas Sowell).
- “Nothing is more deadly to achievement than the belief that effort will not be rewarded, that the world is a bleak and discriminatory place in which only the predatory and the specially preferred can get ahead.” (George Gilder).
- “I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much undetermined and unpredictable, to a pretense of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.” (F.A. Hayek).
- “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.” (Thomas Sowell).
- “What one person disdains or values lightly is appreciated by another, and what one person abandons is often picked up by another.” (Carl Menger).
- “Demand and supply are the opposite extremes of the beam, whence depend the scales of dearness and cheapness; the price is the point of equilibrium, where the momentum of the one ceases, and that of the other begins.” (Jean-Baptiste Say).
- “The disdain of profit is due to ignorance, and to an attitude that we may if we wish admire in the ascetic who has chosen to be content with a small share of the riches of this world, but which, when actualized in the form of restrictions on profits of others, is selfish to the extent that it imposes asceticism, and indeed deprivations of all sorts, on others.” (F.A. Hayek).
- “All people, however fanatical they may be in their zeal to disparage and to fight capitalism, implicitly pay homage to it by passionately clamoring for the products it turns out.” (Ludwig von Mises).
- “Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone.” (Frédéric Bastiat).
- “Everything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for. The world is full of so-called economists who in turn are full of schemes for getting something for nothing.” (Henry Hazlitt).
- “The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule.” (F.A. Hayek).
- “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).
- “All trades, arts and handiworks have gained by division of labour, namely, when, instead of one man doing everything, each confines himself to a certain kind of work distinct from others in the treatment it requires, so as to be able to perform it with greater facility and in the greatest perfection. Where the different kinds of work are not distinguished and divided, where everyone is a jack-of-all-trades, there manufactures remain still in the greatest barbarism.” (Immanuel Kant).
- “It is not true that Congress spends money like a drunken sailor. Drunken sailors spend their own money. Congress spends our money.” (Art Laffer).
- “People who lack the capacity to earn a decent living need to be helped, but they will not be helped by minimum-wage laws, trade-union wage pressures or other devices which seek to compel employers to pay them more than their [labor] is worth. The more likely outcome of such regulations is that the intended beneficiaries are not employed at all.” (James Tobin).
- “Nothing should be more obvious than that the business organism cannot function according to design when its most important ‘parameters of action’—wages, prices, interest—are transferred to the political sphere and there dealt with according to the requirements of the political game or, which sometimes is more serious still, according to the ideas of some planners.” (Joseph A. Schumpeter).
- “Failure is part of the natural cycle of business. Companies are born, companies die, capitalism moves forward.” (Thomas Sowell).
- “The way to maximize production is to maximize the incentives to production. And the way to do that, as the modern world has discovered, is through the system known as capitalism—the system of private property, free markets and free enterprise.” (Henry Hazlitt).
- “A people averse to the institution of private property is without the first elements of freedom.” (Lord Acton).
- “Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments.” (Ludwig Von Mises).
- “Citizens who over-rely on their government to do everything not only become dependent on their government, they end up having to do whatever the government demands. In the meantime, their initiative and self-respect are destroyed.” (Charles G. Koch).
Take heed, dear reader, especially those of you charged with prosecuting public policy. For these sentiments are immutable truisms, not dated anachronisms, and certainly not the “old-think” that the sad purveyors of public policy “progressivism” will argue them to be.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
