Ronald Reagan Quotes

The more the government plans fail, the more the planners plan.

Finally, let's keep well in mind the most important lesson of the auto rescue: While government should stay away from the private sector as much as possible, markets do occasionally fail, and when they do government can play a constructive role, as it did in the case of the auto rescue.

And people talk about the stimulus package and the jobs that it was supposed to create, it certainly didn't have the intended effects that everybody was hoping for or that the president and administration certainly was hoping for. So I think it's time to lay some new solutions on the table, some new ideas.

If there's unemployment, having the government help reduce that unemployment, increase employment directly is a pretty good idea. It's not driving out competition; it's not crowding out.

I was criticized at some level within the Republican Party by those who say government should not be in the economic development business at all. My response is that the only country I know that doesn't have an economic development plan is Papa New Guinea.

I've criticized President Bush for his failure to use his veto pen. There's plenty of blame to go around. The question is how to solve problems. It's not bailouts. What made America great? Free markets, free enterprise, manufacturing, job creation. That's how we're gonna do it, not by enlarging government.

Now the proposal is yet again another $150 billion before we start to think about a freeze. But $150 billion spent on more government programs; monies being created to direct and what kind of jobs that Washington thinks ought to be created. Come on. I mean there is a government that can help, and the government can also hurt.

Why was there so much work-sharing in the 1930s? One reason is that government pushed for it. In his memoirs, President Herbert Hoover estimated that as many as two million workers avoided unemployment as a result of his efforts to promote work-sharing.

Not only our future economic soundness but the very soundness of our democratic institutions depends on the determination of our government to give employment to idle men.

Globalization causes job and income losses in certain sectors which exact significant psychological tolls. The government, therefore, has a responsibility to channel help from the winners to the losers.

Let’s have a moratorium on press conferences …. Get off your asses and let’s do something and fix the biggest doggone crisis in the history of this country.

The new frontier is idle men, money and machines, and all the resourcefulness, ingenuity and courage that reside in twelve or thirteen million unemployed men is helpless to take up this new frontier without tremendous organization of productive forces such as only government can supply when business is in the doldrums.

Government does not create jobs. Government does not create jobs.

It is not part of the functions of the national government to find employment for people - and if we were to appropriate a hundred millions for this purpose, we should be taxing forty millions of people to keep a few thousand employed.

Republican leaders have made clear they have no plans to use the power of government to stimulate the economy, invest in job creation and spur job growth. The Fed's plan is to give banks more money to finance the private sector job creation. But banks have ample cash now; they aren't lending, and the private sector is not creating the jobs. That is why we have 15 million people unemployed.

I am against market fundamentalism. I think this propaganda that government involvement is always bad has been very successful - but also very harmful to our society.

Welfare policies never attain those - allegedly beneficial - ends which the government and the self-styled progressives who advocated them wanted to attain, but - on the contrary - bring about a state of affairs which - from the very point of view of the government and its supporters - is even more unsatisfactory than the previous state of affairs they wanted to 'improve.'

I fear that, as conditions worsen, many will react to the failures of too much government by calling for even more government. Then there will be more and more lifeboats launched because fewer and fewer citizens know how to swim. Unlike some pendulums, political pendulums to not swing back automatically; they must be pushed. History is full of instances when people have waited in vain for pendulums to swing back.

Competence doesn't seem like a big deal until you are forced to realize that your own government has none.

If you surrender everything to the government and give it total power to plan the whole economy, this will not guarantee your economic security, but it will guarantee the descent of the entire nation to a level of miserable poverty--as the practical results of every totalitarian economy, communist or fascist, have demonstrated.

When the Federal government buys the mortgages, they're not spending it, they're investing it.

Government intervention in the economy - through taxes, regulation and, most importantly, currency inflation - causes distortions and misallocations of capital that must eventually be unwound. The distortions degrade the general standard of living, and the economy goes into a recession (call that an incomplete cleansing). Or it goes into a depression - wherein the entire sickly structure comes unglued.

It has been a long fight to put the control of our economic system in the hands of the government.

As long as the working-people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give them work, so long they will not get it.

What is politically defined as economic planning is the forcible superseding of other people's plans by Government officials.