John Stossel Quotes

Capitalism does millions of things better than the alternatives. It balances supply and demand in an elegant way that central planning has never come close to.

The left must shelve its centralist megalomania and drop the obsessive conviction that the State can effectively control the whole economy … The left must stand up for consumer rights, free investment decisions, the free disposal of assets, and a decentralized decision making process

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

Under capitalism each individual engages in economic planning.

The great thing about capitalism is that it's a system that works.

I'm a capitalist by conviction and profession. I believe the best economic system is one that rewards entrepreneurship and risk-taking, maximizes customer choice, uses markets to allocate scarce resources and minimizes the regulatory burden on business.

What we want is to establish the rules of a market economy - not to plan its outcome.

[The choice is between] chaos, confusion, bankruptcy, state socialism or communism, and the American way of life.

If history could prove and teach us anything, it would be that private ownership of the means of production is a necessary requisite of civilization and material well-being.... Only nations committed to the principle of private property have risen above penury and produced science, art and literature.

The key to democracy has been the free market economy.

Our belief in free markets and a level playing field are values that make the world more free, fair, and prosperous.

Free markets are amazing.

With Anglo-American capitalism increasingly under attack, those who believe in the power of free markets and enterprise to create wealth and social progress must stand up and be counted and champion our way of life.

You've got to have free markets with limited government, with the proper amount of regulation where you don't jam entrepreneurship.

I like free markets, I like competition.

Indeed, if communist central planners could have organized the economy with as much detail, precision, and flexibility as a modern-day Toyota or Wal-Mart, communism would probably still exist.

Free enterprise is the best economic system in the history of the world, because it is the only system where you can make poor people richer and you don't have to make rich people poor.

Government central planning means over-riding other people's plans.

It doesn't require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property?

As a result of the efforts of Hayek .. and the many others who share his general outlook, the idea of a centrally planned and centrally administered economy, so popular in the 1930s and early 1940s, has been discredited.

Capitalism has given people both the liberty and the incentive to create, produce, and trade, thereby generating prosperity.

It's a real enigma why people are so averse to real free market capitalism even now. Here we are, in the century that has seen Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Castro, Pol Pot-and we're still being warned against the 'robber barons' of the 19th century. I don't know that Jay Gould or John D. Rockefeller ever killed anyone. The State has killed countless people, and yet we're always supposed to remain on guard against these 'greedy villains' of yesteryear.

People vastly overestimate the ability of central planners to improve on the independent action of diverse individuals. What I've learned watching regulators is that they almost always make things worse. If regulators did nothing, the self-correcting mechanisms of the market would mitigate most problems with more finesse. And less cost.

The freer the market is and the more respect you have for private property, the better the environment is protected.

Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices. It is this superlatively moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventative law, snooping bureaucrats, and the chronic goad of fear.