Friedrich Hayek Quotes

All legislative experiments in the way of making forcible distribution of the wealth produced in any country have failed.

'Egalitarians' who complain about inequality view the wealth of the wealthiest as bad in itself: it disfigures society. They would enact a wealth tax to extirpate the offending wealth.

I don't believe in trickle-down economics. I don't think that people who have the most are inclined to share it, generally.

One way to reduce income inequality is to get rid of the rich. If Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch and their billionaire friends could be persuaded to emigrate from the United States, income inequality would decrease overnight.

On GOP Tax Cuts: They'll take food out of the mouths of children to give tax cuts to the wealthiest.

Trickle-down did not work. It got us into the mess we were in, in 2008 and 2009. Slashing taxes on the wealthy hasn’t worked. And a lot of really smart, wealthy people know that. And they are saying, hey, we need to do more to make the contributions we should be making to rebuild the middle class.

Government can't deliver a free lunch to the country as a whole. It can, however, determine who pays for lunch. And last week the Senate handed the bill to the wrong party... the poor and middle class.

When people ask, "Why should the rich pay a larger percent of their income than middle-income people?" - my answer is not an answer most people get: It's because their power developed from laws that enriched them.

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.

I don't believe in a redistribution of wealth.

The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.

The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we'll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.

Spreading the wealth punishes success while setting America on course for a greater dependency on government.

The amassing of unfettered wealth of individuals and corporations should stop. The inheritance of rich people's wealth by their children should stop. The expropriators should have their wealth expropriated and redistributed.

If we're not going to tax the rich anymore, we're going to create class warfare.

Bush is giving the rich a tax cut instead of putting that cut in the pockets of working people.

The tax relief that this Congress has given now in terms of four tax cuts has overwhelmingly gone to the people at the very top of the income scale in America.

There is a legitimate concern about wealth distribution in the United States, but the answer is not to scapegoat any individual who makes over $200,000 per year and to try to sell the fraud that the government can equitably take the money of those who have earned it and give it to those who haven't.

At the same time, Republicans are pushing a $70 billion tax package that will overwhelmingly benefit the most wealthy Americans and actually increases the deficit by $16 billion.

I have before me a newspaper slip on which a writer expresses the opinion that no one should be allowed to possess more than one million dollars' worth of property.

Not surprisingly, some of the super-rich declined to join the Patriotic Millionaires when the Agenda Project reached out to them. At least two airily dismissed the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and above - which will cost well over $700 billion over the coming decade - as small potatoes.

I argue that one of the functions of a capitalist state is to defend capitalism from itself, to defend capitalism from the capitalists.

It is hard to redistribute wealth of there is no productive class producing it.

When you say fiscal responsibility, it seems to me that you really mean rich people keeping their money.

The Tory approach depended on benefits trickling down from a process that inevitably strengthened the already strong.