Arthur Capper Quotes

It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.

Successful economies in the modern world are not sheepish about the power and responsibility of the state.

There's no conflict between the social-welfare state and open markets.

While I am a fervent believer in free markets and limited government, there are rare instances in which government involvement is necessary.

The market economy does not automatically guarantee growth, social justice, or even economic efficiency; achieving those ends requires that government play an important role.

I understand fully that jobs are created by the private sector, having been all my life in the private sector, but I don't buy the argument that the state has no role to play.

It should not be the government running the economy.

Big government doesn't help the middle class, it buries it.

I clearly believe a lot more than some of my coalition colleagues - Tories - in redistribution and using the tax system for that purpose. I also believe in the government having an active role in the economy, which is having an industrial strategy. I'm not a believer in laissez-faire.

The realities of the modern global economy require government to play a substantial role in ensuring the national and economic security of the people.

Government has a perfect right, indeed a duty, to intervene in the economy in the name of justice, ecology, strategic interests, full employment, or other public goods in which the market has and can have no interest.

The job of government must be to provide the rules and the climate that will let the system work.

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

Government has always driven growth.

The government playing entrepreneur is not a good role for the government.

Today we see how utterly mistaken was the Milton Friedman notion that a market system can regulate itself... Everyone understands now, on the contrary, that there can be no solution without government.

When everything is going well, the role of the state in the economy should be limited. When we are in a crisis, it's different.

Government isn't there just to administer life support to failing markets. Without the government, many of those markets would not even exist.

Many people say that in a liberalised world there is little for the government to do, but the fact is that there is much for the government to do in fewer areas. One such area is to provide infrastructure.

I expect to see the State, which is in a position to calculate the marginal efficiency of capital-goods on long views and on the basis of the general social advantage, taking an ever greater responsibility for directly organizing investments.

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.

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.

Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer.

Whether we like it or not, government intervention in the face of surplus is here to stay.

Whatever the economy needs to maintain itself, the government will do it.