Nick Hanauer Quotes

Government can't create wealth, but it can create the conditions for private enterprise to flourish.

Free enterprise empowers entrepreneurs who have ideas and imagination, investors who take risks, and workers who hone their skills and offer their labor.

I had watched for many years and seen how a few rich families held much of Argentina's wealth and power in their hands. So Peron and the government brought in an eight hour working day, sickness pay and fair wages to give poor workers a fair go .

The appropriate role of government is to provide the framework that allows capital to flow freely, in accord with the law of supply and demand. That is how jobs, businesses and wealth are created. The government would have no money to distribute or spend without the tax revenue generated from the jobs and businesses that are the fruit of our capitalist system.

The capitalist system, in spite of all obstacles put in its way by governments and politicians, has raised the standard of living of the masses in an unprecedented way.

If you happen to be in the right place at the right time, the capitalist system is a beautiful thing.

Free enterprise has done more to lift people out of poverty, to help build a strong middle class, to help educate our kids, and to make our lives better than all the programs of government combined.

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan understand that government does not create jobs. Entrepreneurs do.

It's been said that government doesn't create jobs, business does. For the most part, this is true. But government creates the environment in which businesses can excel and expand.

Private ownership of property is vital to both our freedom and our prosperity.

Government does not create wealth. The major role for the government is to create an environment where people take risks to expand the job rate in the United States.

We need to reclaim our American system of limited government, low taxes, reasonable regulations, and sound money, which has blessed us with unprecedented prosperity. And it has done more to help the poor than any other economic system ever designed.

The White House doesn't create jobs. The government together - White House, Congress - creates policies that allow for greater job creation.

I unabashedly, unashamedly, unequivocally support the explosion of entrepreneurs in the capitalist system.

Many people think that the U.S. is ahead in the frontier technology sectors as a result of private sector entrepreneurship. It's not. The U.S. federal government created all these sectors.

While I am a fervent believer in free markets and limited government, there are rare instances in which government involvement is necessary.

The market economy does not automatically guarantee growth, social justice, or even economic efficiency; achieving those ends requires that government play an important role.

There can be no distress, there can be no hard times, when labor is well paid. The man who raises his hand against the progress of the workingman raises his hand against prosperity.

Neither the lawmaker nor the capitalist possesses any miraculous power of multiplying loaves and fishes; or of commanding, like the enchanters of old, broomsticks to do the work of men. They must have labourers, skilled labourers, and without them it is nonsense to talk of improving a country …

There is then a universal and forced tendency to reduce to the lowest the workers’ wages, and this law is sufficient to crush all the best intentions of employers, prisoners of the social order, by which, however, they benefit.

The profit-grinding system is maintained by competition, or veiled war, not only between the conflicting classes, but also within the classes themselves: there is always war among the workers for bare subsistence, and among their masters, the employers and middle-men, for the share of the profit wrung out of the workers; lastly, there is competition always, and sometimes open war, among the nations of the civilised world for their share of the world-market.

We’re the party that wants to see an America in which people can still get rich.

The proportion of mental workers increases with the cultural development of the people…. The capitalist, or entrepreneur contributes mental labor to his enterprise. His work is that of organizing and managing the business. The wage-earner’s contribution consists chiefly of physical labor.

When rich men are thus brought to regard themselves as trustees, and poor men learn to be industrious, economical, temperate, self-denying, and diligent in the acquisition of knowledge, then the deplorable strife between capital and labor, tending to destroy their fundamental, necessary, and irrefragable harmony will cease, and the world will no longer be afflicted with such unnatural industrial conflicts as we have seen during the past century...

Those politicians, professors and union bosses who curse big business are fighting for a lower standard of living.