Thomas Sowell Quotes

The only way you can stop the unregulated monopoly ... from gouging ... is to introduce competition.

I saw how the regulation I called for made things worse, didn't help consumers and simple competition was better. And I started praising business and occasionally criticizing regulation.

Competition is not only the basis of protection to the consumer, but is the incentive to progress.

You'll have lower prices under deregulation than you will through regulation.

…society in a modern democracy will not permit unregulated control over production and sale of its necessities.

We want a free market, but we know that the paradox of a 'free' market is that sometimes you have to intervene. You have to make sure it's not the law of the jungle but the laws of democracy that works.

Markets that don't work we're going to step away from.

When the government gets involved in pricing, I don't think it's the right way to look at a business.

But nothing is better than the market, where the customer and the business deal directly with each other, because if you rip people off, word gets out. That business eventually loses its customers, and the good ones that serve people well get the business. You get government in there, and it's just more money for the lawyers who write the bills.

The invisible hand of the market always moves faster and better than the heavy hand of government.

All regulation can ever do is approximate the results of competition.

I started out by viewing the marketplace as a cruel place, where you need intervention by government and lawyers to protect people. But after watching the regulators work, I have come to believe that markets are magical and the best protectors of the consumer. It is my job to explain the beauties of the free market.

It doesn't really matter who owns things so long there is enough competition, which means lower pricing, better quality goods, more variety, and an economy where the consumers are the big winners.

My worldview says that competition is the consumer's best friend.

While admirers of capitalism, we also to a certain extent believe it has limitations that require government intervention in markets to make them work.

I think that there is absolutely no free market in modern industrial states.

It is impossible to objectively define how free a market is. This is a political definition. Government is always involved, and those free marketers are as politically motivated as anyone.

We no longer have a free market in the United States, we have a government controlled free market.

Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.

There is no pure free-market economy.

The duty of government is to leave commerce to its own capital and credit as well as all other branches of business, protecting all in their legal pursuits, granting exclusive privileges to none.

Unregulated competition is a naive metaphor for anarchy.

We have protected our domestic industry far too long and they were happily dishing out substandard goods. Now, they see red when there is competition

I do not expect monopoly to restrain itself.

We ... deceive ourselves in believing that competition can secure for the public fair treatment in such cases.