Fareed Zakaria Quotes

[D]ecade after decade, through taxes and regulations, governments at all levels took ever-increasing control over people's lives, wealth, and property. The control grew exponentially, decade after decade. The rationale was that the control was necessary -- for society, for the poor, for the nation, even for freedom itself. Americans continued living their life of the lie: they continued believing that the more control government exercised over their lives and property, the freer they became.

We no longer have a free market in the United States, we have a government controlled free market.

I think we need to significantly reduce the regulatory burden on the private sector. The Obama administration is doing the opposite. They're loading on more and more regulation on the private respect to how the economy functions.

It is time that we dispensed with the myth that the market is a force of nature that should not be meddled with. Markets are social creations that can be, and have been, modified for social purposes.

Political freedom can be inimical to economic freedom.

The New Deal introduced to Americans the spectacle of Fascist dictation to business, labor, and agriculture.

Free competition and the open market system as they were known in the old days, have lost their places in the system, and that the only substitute for them, in these modern times, is government regulation and control.

Most politicians want to be seen as leading the parade. Thus they act to make a good thing better, and when markets slip, they find ways to limit the economic freedom of others.

One of the things that made the marriage between liberty and popular sovereignty possible was the welfare state. Democracy has three parts. It has liberty, it has popular sovereignty, and it has a social safety net as well

More and more it is evident that the State and if necessary the Nation, has got to possess the right of supervision and control as regards the great corporations.

The U.S. is not pure capitalism. In fact, there's no place for pure capitalism, unregulated capitalism. We have a regulated system.

We want a free market, but we know that the paradox of a 'free' market is that sometimes you have to intervene. You have to make sure it's not the law of the jungle but the laws of democracy that works.

Why should the idea of Western liberal democracy automatically imply unregulated free-market capitalism?

The characteristic mark of this age of dictators, wars and revolutions is its anticapitalistic bias. Most governments and political parties were eager to restrict the sphere of private initiative and free enterprise.

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.

Populism is the simple premise that markets need to be restrained by society and by a democratic political system. We are not socialists or communists, we are proponents of regulated capitalism and, I might add, people who have read American history.

Laissez-faire is finished. The all-powerful market that always knows best is finished.

Just what part does the State play in production to warrant its rake-off? The State does not give; it merely takes.

Democracy is not compatible with financial oligarchy.

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.

It isn't possible to give government just a little control over the economy and our lives. Once we cede that power to government, it uses the power to take more from us. That's why every year the government controls more of our lives.

We (British) have reached the state where the private sector is that part of the economy the government controls and the public sector is that part that nobody controls.

The parallel existence and mutual interaction of "state" and "market" in the modern world create "political economy"; without both state and market there could be no political economy.

The 'corporatization of America' during the past century has been an attack on democracy.