Robert Gilpin Quotes

The invisible hand in politics operates in the opposite direction to the invisible hand in the market.

Democracy and markets are both fundamental building blocks for a decent society. But they clash at a fundamental level. We need to balance them.

The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution.

A properly functioning free market system does not spring spontaneously from society's soil as crabgrass springs from suburban lawns. Rather, it is a complex creation of laws and mores... Capitalism is a government program.

Bear in mind that capitalism is a tiny period of human society. You never really had capitalism, you always had one or another variant of state capitalism.

There is simply no other choice than this: either to abstain from interference in the free play of the market, or to delegate the entire management of production and distribution to the government. Either capitalism or socialism: there exists no middle way.

I think that there is absolutely no free market in modern industrial states.

I think that the future belongs to democracy, but not to capitalism, because they are opposite camps.

Capitalism and the market are presented as synonymous, but they are not. Capitalism is both the enemy of the market and democracy.

Just because there is a market failure, doesn’t mean there is a government solution.

We have passed the time of ... the laisser-faire [sic] school which believes that the government ought to do nothing but run a police force.

Political Economy as a branch of science is extremely modern; but the subject with which its enquiries are conversant has in all ages necessarily constituted one of the chief practical interests of mankind.

Whatever men live for, today most live only because of the market order.

Any allegation of runaway capitalism has to be tempered by the observation that today we have the largest public sectors and the highest taxes the world has ever known.

The principle of laissez-faire may be safely trusted to in some things but in many more it is wholly inapplicable; and to appeal to it on all occasions savors more of the policy of a parrot than of a statesman or a philosopher.

I am against market fundamentalism. I think this propaganda that government involvement is always bad has been very successful - but also very harmful to our society.

I certainly think the free-market has failed.

You need a government that believes in government. It also believes in markets and wants to give markets the best, the greatest opportunity, but is trying to govern well.

I do not share the general view that market forces are the basis of personal liberty.

If government could create jobs and raise children, socialism would have worked.

The market economy needs no apologists and propagandists. It can apply to itself the words of Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph in St. Paul's: 'If you seek his monument, look around.'

No matter how deeply wedded one may be to the free enterprise system (and I, for one, am wedded for life), one has to accept the need for positive government; one has to consider government action on a sizable scale as desirable rather than as a necessary evil.

Where there is no market economy, the best intentioned provisions of constitutions and laws remain a dead letter.

The modern world is not geared properly to the storage of goods.

In our complex world, there cannot be fruitful initiative without government, but unfortunately there can be government without initiative.