Paul Krugman Quotes

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 think almost every economist would agree that government gets itself in trouble when it tries to interfere with voluntary behavior.

It is impossible to objectively define how free a market is. This is a political definition. Government is always involved, and those free marketers are as politically motivated as anyone.

The conservative idea is not that government has no role. You might have argued that in the thirties when conservatives opposed the New Deal.

I do not believe that the government is in any position to say exactly how every single business and every single activity shall reach those performances.

I am not someone who tends to advocate for increased government involvement in the private sector.

Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.

I believe in markets before mandates.

I used to think that James Kilpatrick and Barry Goldwater were really conservative, but now we’ve got people to the right of them. They want to use government to be punitive.

Markets are smart and governments are dumb.

Deregulation played virtually no role

I get if you're a conservative, and you're saying, I don't know, 'Government shouldn't be mandating what's taught in classrooms,' or, 'Government is too intrusive in our economic life,' well, that's standard conservatism.

As conservatives, we support free market principles and believe the private sector provides solutions that the government cannot.

‎"I feel certain that Conservatism is through unless Conservatives can demonstrate and communicate the difference between being concerned with [the unemployed, the sick without medical care, human welfare, etc.] and believing that the federal government is the proper agent for their solution.

Depressions and mass unemployment are not caused by the free market but by government interference in the economy.

Mainstream economic theories popular in the last several decades have tended to downplay the government's role in markets and to increase skepticism about even that more limited role. Austerity, particularly in Europe, has added to the problem. It has not worked, even on its own terms.

Nobody wants a nanny state, where the government is stamping out initiative and telling us what to do, but the idea that the only alternative to that is to throw the American people overboard into a global economy with no protections to cushion us from some of these blows is absurd on its face. That's why I think there's been a concerted effort to distort my message. When you hear me speak beyond the sound bites taken out of context, I think I make a lot of sense to people, even those in Red States like the one where I grew up.

Let's face a historical truth: we have never had a "free market", we have always had government intervention in the economy, and indeed that intervention has been welcomed by the captains of finance and industry. They had no quarrel with "big government" when it served their needs.

Only the naive inflationist's could believe that government could enrich mankind through fiat money.

One of the criticisms I make is to what I refer to as more of a libertarianish right... This whole idea of personal autonomy, well, I don't think most conservatives hold that point of view. Some do. They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do... Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world...

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.

There is a difference between Senator Obama and Senator McCain. Senator Obama believes that the government ought to be able to take as much as it thinks it needs from anybody.

The problem isn't that conservatives are wrong about the efficiency of markets or the creativity of enterprise. It's that they have made false idols of both, usually without acknowledging that markets work best when well regulated, that private enterprise cannot meet every human need, that government has always played a critical role in our economy, and that the profit motive can be socially and environmentally destructive as well as dynamic.

What do you think the appropriate role of government is in society? The way I look at this job is, you want me to do X? Well, is the private sector doing X with any kind of success? Because if they are, I'd rather have them do it than have us do it.

Deregulation is a transfer of power from the trodden to the treading. It is unsurprising that all conservative parties claim to hate big government.