Jim Cox Quotes

Our system of market capitalism wasn't handed down, in perfect form, on stone tablets. We wrote the rules. We broke them. And we can fix them.

Establishment of a market economy is seen as mostly involving destruction.

… markets don't look after social needs. Markets are designed to allow individuals to look after their private needs and to pursue profit. It's really a great invention and I wouldn't under-estimate the value of that, but they're not designed to take care of social needs.

A basic contradiction between socialism and the market economy does not exist.

Democracy and economic reform go together.

Markets can do many wonderful things, which is why I'm glad to live in a capitalist country.

I'm not an anti-capitalist, or anarchist. I want capitalism to work.

We want a market economy without any adjectives. Any compromises with that will only fuzzy up the problems we have.

As a poodle may have his hair cut long or his hair cut short, as he may be trimmed with pink ribbons or with blue ribbons, yet he remains the same old poodle, so capitalism may be trimmed with factory laws, tenement laws, divorce laws and gambling laws, but it remains the same old capitalism. These “humanitarian parts” are only trimming the poodle. Socialism, one and inseparable with its “antirent and anticapital parts,” means to get rid of the poodle..

We are on the our way to a free market economy. Regardless of the mistakes and omissions, the government has managed to implement a firm and consistent economic policy. Regardless of how incomplete it still is, the transition to free market relations and democracy has become irreversible.

It's appropriate for people to pursue their profit motive in business. If you want to change that, you're going against human nature. But when it comes to setting the rules or creating the institutions, then you should have the general interest at heart.

The people weren't quite ready for a socialist production system.

What is really at stake here is the survival of the kind of economy under which this country has grown great, the free-enterprise system

The market economy itself was not a product of violent action—of revolutions—but of a series of gradual peaceful changes. The implications of the term “industrial revolution” are utterly misleading.

In America, even revolutions need a commercial sponsor.

The key to democracy has been the free market economy.

Capitalism with airbags—the type of capitalism I am a fan of.

You have to have free enterprise for the many.

30 years after China embarked on its fitful embrace of the free market, it has no single unifying doctrine—no ‘central melody’—and there is nothing predestined about what kind of country it is becoming.

A market economy is to economics what democracy is to government: a decent, if flawed choice, about many bad alternatives

The old ideas won’t do.

The European model is, first, a social and economic system founded on the role of the market, for no computer in the world can process information better than the market.

The basic law of capitalism is you or I, not both you and I.

If we didn't have greed, market economies wouldn't be as innovative as they are. But in my view, greed has to be contained by the fear of losses, so there has to be a system where, if you take too much risk, you go into bankruptcy. You don't systematically bail out people who take excessive risks.

Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.