Robert Solow Quotes

If socialists understood economics, they wouldn't be socialist.

The prevailing theory of capitalism suffers from one central and disabling flaw, a profound distrust and incomprehension of capitalism.

There is no pure free-market economy.

No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek.

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

Nobody believes in completely unadulterated capitalism.

Economics as a discipline has in effect become the study of capitalism. The two are taken as the same subject.

The enormous dynamic and creative, as well as destructive energy of capitalism... is written up with more praise and more respect by Marx and Engels in the 1848 Communist Manifesto than probably by anyone since. I don't think anyone has ever said so precisely and with such awed admiration how great capitalism is, how inventive, how innovative, how dynamic, how much force of creativity it unleashes.

American prosperity and American free enterprise are both highly unusual in the world, and we should not overlook the possibility that the two are connected.

I think it's fairly easy to provide a moral defense of capitalism. It has been - over the last 200 years - the underlying basis for enormous increases in productivity and human welfare and rising living standards, particularly in the United States, and in the industrialized nations but in fact, in most parts of the world.

Other things, like capitalism, free enterprise, the economy, currency, the market, are not forces of nature, we invented them. They are not immutable and we can change them.

Economic knowledge necessarily leads to liberalism

Capitalism is a great idea in theory, but in practice it just doesn't work.

We stand for the maintenance of private property... We shall protect free enterprise as the most expedient, or rather the sole possible economic order.

The left hates capitalism, not because of freedom and liberty - although they do. But the primary they hate capitalism is that it is the most efficient engine to create wealth for the greatest number of people in a society that has ever been devised. Nobody's ever claimed it's perfect. Nobody's ever said it's flawless. But it's better than anything else out there, particularly anything left has to offer.

We need a leader who understands the moral case for free enterprise.

What vitiates entirely the socialists economic critique of capitalism is their failure to grasp the sovereignty of the consumers in the market economy.

Yes to market economy, no to market society.

Capitalism is not a perfect system. It may be better than all the other systems, but it's not a perfect system.

Capitalism is not about the profit motive. Capitalism is about free markets. What you do in the market, in your free will, is the essence of capitalism.

If the central contest of the twentieth century has pitted capitalism against socialism, then F. A. Hayek has been its central figure. He helped us to understand why capitalism won by a knockout. It was Hayek who elaborated the basic argument demonstrating that central planning was nothing else but an impoverishing fantasy.

[T]he theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of production and distribution of a given output produced under the conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire.

The great dynamic success of capitalism had given us a powerful weapon in our battle against Communism-money.

It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.