John D. Rockefeller Quotes

The state has an active role to play in ensuring that there is equilibrium between the constituent parts of the economy, the consumers and the producers.

I don't think that capitalism should be unbridled, if by 'unbridled' you mean unregulated.

We have tried voluntary codes and we have tried free markets, but they have not worked, so we need to try something else. Legislation is not a panacea for all the inequalities in the workplace, but it will go a long way towards stopping them. Effective employment legislation is needed

He who seeks to regulate everything by law, is more likely to arouse vices than to reform them. It is best to grant what cannot be abolished, even though it be in itself harmful.

The first instinct of the modern man is to get a law passed to forbid or prevent what, in his wisdom, he disapproves.

I'm not speaking in favor of killing innovation. I'm speaking in favor of centrist use of the market, which involves necessarily a considerable degree of regulation. Markets by themselves will get themselves inevitably into inequality and into their own destruction. It will happen again and again.

I am quite uncomfortable using legislation to peg the minimum wage.

There is certainly a role for regulation, but regulation should always take into account the impact that it has on markets, a balance that must be constantly weighed.

Rent control has in certain Western countries constituted, maybe, the worst example of poor planning by Governments lacking courage and vision.

My idea is, that if capital and labor are left alone they will mutually regulate each other. People who think they can regulate all mankind and get wrong ideas which they believe to be panaceas for every ill cause much trouble to both employers and employees by their interference.

If all political parties are committed to the role of the free market, the politicians act as, I don't know, as traffic policemen; they stand outside the ring and let the real decisions be slugged out by entrepreneurs. That doesn't seem to me a proper democracy.

You've got to have free markets with limited government, with the proper amount of regulation where you don't jam entrepreneurship.

Laws protecting this right - whatever the level of the minimum wage, and whatever the Government chooses to call it - are only as strong as the threat of enforcement is both real and feared.

I support social market economy. But it only works if there is fair competition.

Control freak politicians never rest, and a few of the more dedicated ones are working relentlessly to slap chains on the world's most unfettered market. The Marketplace Fairness Act will end up forcing consumers to pay higher prices for the goods they desire.

Every bad thing that happens has a ready-made solution in the form of a new government program, tax or regulation.

Liberty is the very last idea that seems to occur to anybody, in considering any political or social proposal. It is only necessary for anybody for any reason to allege any evidence of any evil in any human practice, for people instantly to suggest that the practice should be suppressed by the police.

There is still a tendency to regard any existing government intervention as desirable, to attribute all evils to the market, and to evaluate new proposals for government control in their ideal form, as they might work if run by able, disinterested men free from the pressure of special interest groups.

There ought to be a law about you coming around.

We have passed the time of ... the laisser-faire [sic] school which believes that the government ought to do nothing but run a police force.

I think we had quite enough capitalism in the last eight years; I think we need some regulation now.

Mike Pence, when he was in Congress, voted against raising the minimum wage above $5.15. And he has been a one-man bulwark against minimum wage increases in Indiana.

A properly functioning free market system does not spring spontaneously from society's soil as crabgrass springs from suburban lawns. Rather, it is a complex creation of laws and mores... Capitalism is a government program.

When should we nudge and when should we shove, I think, it's a political judgment. Obviously in some situations we need shoves, we need laws. Fraud is against the law, murder is against the law, drunk-driving is against the law. We don't need just nudges.

Let's face a historical truth: we have never had a "free market", we have always had government intervention in the economy, and indeed that intervention has been welcomed by the captains of finance and industry. They had no quarrel with "big government" when it served their needs.