Nigel Lawson Quotes

Milton Friedman’s misfortune is that his economic policies have been tried.

I believe Mrs. Thatcher's emphasis on enterprise was right.

Blair worshipped Thatcherism, could see little or no wrong in it, believed that that was what the country needed, thought that there was no alternative, regarded it as a legacy that had to be built on rather than rejected.

In the 1980s, we were advised, why don't you follow Reaganomics or Thatcherite economics. We said, yes, there are good points, let's see how we can fit them in the Indian economy. Every country has its own way of moving forward.

I am sure future historians will say the biggest and most astonishing change in politics has been the embracing of all the tenets of Thatcherism by the party of Keir Hardie: trade union legislation, Europe, the replacement of Trident, 10 per cent tax for people who have made millions from their companies.

The Republican Party and the conservative free market movement have been presidentially focused for too long.

The difficulty for the Government is there's this ideological straitjacket of the market will provide, let the market rip and everything will work out... It's back to trickle-down economics, which, it's plain to see, have not delivered.

Milton Friedman is a man with dangerously simplistic visions and explanations of the economic world.

When you grow up in the Soviet society under the communists you heard about the one man who is especially dangerous, especially crazy, and absolutely mad, and which would destroy all the human beings and the economies and so on, and this man was called Milton Friedman.

Since the end of the 1970s, free-market capitalism has been in, and socialism has been out.

During the 1980s, many people mistook Thatcherism and Reaganism - actually a wild form of liberalism - for conservatism.

I was very identified with and accused of being a neo-liberal with respect to the economy.

Since the start of the Thatcher economic and fiscal reforms the U.K. economy has expanded five-fold.

The analysis in the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher was that government was interfering with the efficiency of the economy through protectionism, government subsidies, and government ownership. Once the government "got out of the way," private markets would allocate resources efficiently and generate robust growth. Development would simply come.

In Poland we still believe - and this certainly applies to my government - that greater competitiveness, and greater growth and savings are possible in an economy which is as sparely regulated as possible, where freedom, competition and private ownership are key values.

Thatcherism has become bigger than she ever was.

Except in certain enclaves of absurdity and irrelevance, such as the universities and the Public Broadcasting System, virtually no one in the world believes any more that there is a system preferable to ours: more benign, more equitable, more productive. Another way many people liked to refer to what we were doing was waging "a battle of ideas." That battle, at least among serious people, is now over. We have won it.... [I]t is the sight of these stricken, homeless orphans of the Left that convinces us that our work in this Committee has been successfully concluded.

You should be cautious when criticizing the liberalization of economic theory.

In the 1980s and 1990s, radical change in economic policies fostered by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher put the brakes on government planning and ushered in a new free-market supply-side era and a two-decade boom. That model has been abandoned in the new century. This must be reversed.

In the 1980s and 1990s, anglophone conservatives were motivated by ideas so powerful that they spread from the United States and Britain to the rest of the world: faith in democracy, faith in free markets, faith in free trade.

You know, I'm a free market politician and I think I'm the only one who worked for think-tanks like the Montreal Economic Institute.

With each step away from communist constructivism to Hayekian capitalism, China has been richly rewarded.

We must stand firm against the Left's nationalisation obsession.

I didn't become a Tory just to become part of a managerial group who wanted to run the country... I want to see popular free-market Conservatism where barriers are broken down, people have got more opportunities but keep more of their own money.

The term neo-liberal does not have a good definition. It's mostly used when you are angry with somebody or dislike someone, you call them a neo-liberal. Because otherwise, there is no concrete definition to the term.