P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

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.

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

If you want government to take everything, if you want government to take more and more over with the banks, more of the industries, all of a sudden you're going to have a government auto czar, right there, right down the line, that's socialism.

The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution.

It is a mark of how far we have gone on the road to serfdom that government allocation and rationing of oil is the automatic response to the oil crisis.

No matter how deeply wedded one may be to the free enterprise system (and I, for one, am wedded for life), one has to accept the need for positive government; one has to consider government action on a sizable scale as desirable rather than as a necessary evil.

There is simply no other choice than this: either to abstain from interference in the free play of the market, or to delegate the entire management of production and distribution to the government. Either capitalism or socialism: there exists no middle way.

I think almost every economist would agree that government gets itself in trouble when it tries to interfere with voluntary behavior.

It isn't possible to give government just a little control over the economy and our lives. Once we cede that power to government, it uses the power to take more from us. That's why every year the government controls more of our lives.

We (British) have reached the state where the private sector is that part of the economy the government controls and the public sector is that part that nobody controls.

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

My view... would be that we are entering upon a new and interim society which is neither capitalist nor socialist, but in which we can achieve central planning without loss of individual initiative, by the mere process of absorbing initiative in the function of planning.

No less than 50 percent of the means of production must be in the hands of the state.

When Government has a monopoly of all production and all distribution, as many Governments have, it can not permit any economic activity that competes with it.

The existence of a free market does not of course eliminate the need for government. On the contrary, government is essential both as a forum and for determining the “rules of the game”.

I would prefer the [USA] government to be the policeman and not the businessman.

The Founding Fathers knew a government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose.

The characteristic mark of this age of dictators, wars and revolutions is its anticapitalistic bias. Most governments and political parties were eager to restrict the sphere of private initiative and free enterprise.

[D]ecade after decade, through taxes and regulations, governments at all levels took ever-increasing control over people's lives, wealth, and property. The control grew exponentially, decade after decade. The rationale was that the control was necessary -- for society, for the poor, for the nation, even for freedom itself. Americans continued living their life of the lie: they continued believing that the more control government exercised over their lives and property, the freer they became.

Any large extension of the Government into business affairs - no matter what the pretense and no matter how the the extension is labeled - will be bound to promote waste and put a curb on our prosperity and progress.

I will raise my voice as long as God gives me sound or ability, against this Communistic idea that the Government will take care of us all, and everything belongs to the government. It is wrong!

Those who advocate more and more government regulation have been experimenting for 40 years, trying to create an economic system in which everyone can somehow be made more prosperous by the toil of someone else.

Two-thirds of a century after [The Road to Serfdom] got written, hindsight confirms how inaccurate its innuendo about the future turned out to be.

There are some who maintain that trade will regulate itself, and it is not to be benefited by the encouragements or restraints of government. Such persons will imagine that there is no need of a common directing power. This is one of those wild speculative paradoxes, which have grown into credit among us, contrary to the uniform practice and sense of the most enlightened nations.

The laissez-faire argument relies on the same tacit appeal to perfection as does communism.