Reed Hundt Quotes

The government’s role is to motivate the private sector, to assure that it performs in a way which serves the public interest.

To say that only those businesses affected with a public interest may be regulated is but another way of stating that all those businesses which may be regulated are affected with a public interest.

The perception of broadcasters as community trustees should be replaced by a view of broadcasters as marketplace participants.

Big business, for all its lobbying, is often put in line by investigative reporting, public scandals and multi-million-dollar judgments in court against those who put products on the market that are dangerous to their buyers.

We ... deceive ourselves in believing that competition can secure for the public fair treatment in such cases.

The railroads saw that they must either accept control by the State of control the State.

The importance of supervising the business of great railways and industrial combinations and the necessary investigation and prosecution of unlawful business methods are another necessary tax upon Government which did not exist half a century ago.

It's appropriate for people to pursue their profit motive in business. If you want to change that, you're going against human nature. But when it comes to setting the rules or creating the institutions, then you should have the general interest at heart.

With deregulation, one sector of the economy after another is "liberated" to capital's unmonitored authority. The very notion that there is a public interest is contested…. Deregulation has been, above all else, a means of reducing corporate business's accountability to the public.

Free men engaged in free enterprise build better nations, but free enterprise is not a hunting license.

Our aim is not to do away with corporations; on the contrary, these big aggregations are an inevitable development of modern industrialism …. We are not hostile to them; we are merely determined that they shall be so handled as to subserve the public good. We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth.

The great corporations which we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts are the creatures of the State, and the State not only has the right to control them, but it is duty bound to control them wherever the need of such control is shown.

The Nordic governments have adopted a market-friendly approach to regulation. Although they maintain regulations to protect workers, consumers and the environment, they balance those protections with a system that encourages entrepreneurship and flexibility by making it easy to start or close a business, to hire or fire employees, and to adjust work hours.

Deregulation played virtually no role

We need new laws to rein in the forces of greed and to curb those ingenious legal advisors of the holders of vast corporate wealth.

[The beef trust is] an atrocious conspiracy of greed against need…. Can anyone deny that such absolute control by a few men over the food supply of the nation is in the highest degree hostile to the public welfare.

Progressives regard government as the white knight that protects the public from the greed of capitalists. If only.

Lawmakers must stand up for companies that choose public safety over profit margins.

When we control business in the public interest we are also bound to encourage it in the public interest or it will be a bad thing for everybody and worst of all for those on whose behalf the control is nominally exercised.

Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business is Ralph Nader, who - thanks largely to the media - has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans.

Why something in the public interest such as television news can be fought over, like a chain of hamburger stands, eludes me.

I've seen disgusting excess in business, and I've seen disgusting excess in Washington. But at the same time, I've certainly learned that Washington matters and that you can't ignore it, especially when you get into telecom.

Broadcasting is really too important to be left to the broadcasters.

In the U.K., the history of regulation, certainly regulation of the media, is one in which, time and again, successive governments lacked the 'bottle' to enforce the powers that were available to them.

You'd be a fool or a deluded idealist to think ethics would be prominent on Wall Street. That is not a statement against people in the money business, just a fact.