David Brin Quotes

I had a history teacher who taught us a lot about the Cold War. You had these examples of countries where the government had tried to manage the economy really intensely, and it ended up being bad for the citizens there. I found myself beginning to lean more right on economic issues.

The fully planned economy, so far from being unpopular, is warmly regarded by those who know it best.

The inefficiency of political control of an economy has been demonstrated more often, in more places, and under more varied conditions, than almost anything outside the realm of pure science.

The statists want to control the economy.

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 party cannot relinquish its leading role in the economy.

Markets can do certain things, but markets cannot do other things

It is true that the role of the state in the Russian economy may be too big today, but from the fiscal standpoint, it is not always practical to do this in a falling market.

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.

Laissez-faire is finished. The all-powerful market that always knows best is finished.

While, politically, a mixed economy preserves the semblance of an organized society with a semblance of law and order, economically it is the equivalent of the chaos that had ruled China for centuries: a chaos of robber gangs looting-and draining-the productive elements of the country.

Politicians and bureaucrats are substituting their uninformed, largely political decisions for those of the marketplace. Their past miscalculations demonstrate that they do not and cannot possess the information, knowledge, means, and discipline to manage the economy.

We are not smart enough to leave things to the market.

In most circles, the idea of economic planning has been in disrepute most of the time and, particularly in America, has almost carried connotations of intellectual and moral perversion and even political subversion.

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

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

There's not a single country that actually approaches economics in a pure, free market, capitalist way. I like the free market - but it very much exists only in textbooks. If I had a choice, and we could live in a very pure world, I would be a supporter of the free markets.

There is a state that is able to understand the demand in the economy. That state should use prices as an instrument for implementation of this understanding.

There is no pure free-market economy.

You've got Washington picking winners and losers. And so, all of a sudden, decisions are being made on what helps politicians, not what helps the economy. Some will call it socialism. Some will call it a command and control economy. Whatever it is, it's antithetical to the American experience.

No company fails in communist China, because they're all partly owned by the government.

They still have some money, and they have needs to supply. They must begin immediately to pool their earnings and organize industries to participate in supplying social and economic demands.

This island is almost made of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish in Great Britain at the same time.

Only God can fix prices.

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