Noam Chomsky Quotes

If you sell me a car, we have perhaps made a good bargain for ourselves. But there are effects of this transaction on others, which we do not take into account. There is more pollution, the price of gas goes up, there is more congestion.

I am convinced that if the market system were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aims, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind.

The market doesn't work very well when it comes to public goods.

The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we're not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the U.S. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that eternality remains unpriced.

If I buy a car, I use the car, you don't, and the market for cars works pretty well. But there are many other sorts of goods, often very important goods, which are not provided well through the market. Often, these go under the heading of public goods.

The oil market is the biggest failure of the free market because it did not take into account the environmental damage.

Markets are lethal, if only because of ignoring externalities, the impacts of their transactions on the environment.

My citizen activism is a direct outgrowth of a classical and fiscally conservative training in economics at Harvard. It is a perspective rooted in one of the most important concepts in economics - the need for government intervention in the presence of a market failure.

No major technological change has ever been instituted by mankind without an array of negative consequences. The motor car has meant liberation for millions, but it has also caused congestion, environmental damage, and a disturbing death toll on the roads.

The failure of market catallactics in no way denies the following truth: given sufficient knowledge the optimal decisions can always be found by scanning over all the attainable states of the world and selecting the one which according to the postulated ethical welfare function is best. The solution 'exists'; the problem is how to 'find' it.

What polluters do is raise the standards of living for themselves, while lowering the quality of living for everybody else, and they do that by escaping the disciplines of the free market.

The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better.

We don't let a car company just throw out a car and start driving it around without checking that the wheels are fastened on. We know that would result in death; but for some reason we have no hesitation at throwing out some algorithms untested and unmonitored even when they're making very important life-and-death decisions.

You show me pollution and I will show you people who are not paying their own way, people who are stealing from the public, people who are getting the public to pay their costs of production. All environmental pollution is a subsidy.

I think, to a certain extent the economy and these decisions I made to protect the country matter a lot.

Economic policy and decision making do not function in a political vacuum.

Between 1965 (the beginning of LBJ's "Great Society") and 1994, welfare spending has cost the taxpayers $5.4 trillion in constant 1993 dollars. The War on Poverty has cost us 70 % more than the total price tag for defeating both Germany and Japan in World War II, after adjusting for inflation. Many believe that Welfare has destroyed millions of families and cost a huge portion of our national wealth in the process.

I certainly think the free-market has failed.

When it comes to the environment, the invisible hand never picks up the check.

There is a divergence between private and social accounting that the market fails to register. One essential task of law and government is to institute the necessary conditions.

The fatal attraction of government is that it allows busybodies to impose decisions on others without paying any price themselves. That enables them to act as if there were no price, even when there are ruinous prices - paid by others.

I think it [Brexit] is wonderful.We've got to decide in this country who we are.We made a momentous decision.It's a bit like a prison break.

You are always factoring in the economy within the process of creating something, and making decisions that seem both fearless and full of fear.

Where is the pricing system that offers the consumer a fair choice between air to breathe and motor cars to drive about in?