Theodore Roosevelt Quotes

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.

Trust and transparency, the great principles of the free market, are at stake here.

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.

there are times when we need to step in to make sure that competition works the way it should. By doing that, we help the market to work fairly, because competition gives consumers the power to demand a fair deal. It means that companies know that if they cannot offer good prices or the service that's expected, well, the customers will go somewhere else.

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.

Men may differ as to the particular form of governmental activity with respect to industry and business, but nearly all are agreed that private enterprise in times such as these cannot be left without assistance and without reasonable safeguards lest it destroy not only itself but also our processes of civilization.

Business, too, need to mend its ways. For many years various sections of American industry have asked for special legislation which offered a temporary benefit at the expense of normal economic processes. Business has asked for special subsidies and special tariffs, for special protection against price cutters or low cost producers, for government appropriations for this or that special purpose. Business cannot ask for government interference at one time, and then indignantly reject it at another.

It should be as much the aim of those who seek social betterment to rid the business world of crimes of cunning as to rid the entire body politic of crimes of violence.

We demand that big business give the people a square deal; in return we must insist that when anyone engaged in big business honestly endeavors to do right he shall himself be given a square deal.

A market is a place set apart for men to deceive and get the better of one another.

Look with favor on the merchants of the land; always care for them; let no one order them about, for through their trading the land becomes prosperous ...

Let’s put common decency ahead of corporate profits.

There can be no distress, there can be no hard times, when labor is well paid. The man who raises his hand against the progress of the workingman raises his hand against prosperity.

A man may not sell above the current price, i.e., such a price as is usual in the time and place, and as another (who knows the worth of the commodity) would give for it When a man loseth in his commodity for want of skill, etc., he must look at it as his own fault or cross, and therefore must not lay it upon another

Rational as distinguished from vindictive regulation by public authority turns out to be an extremely delicate problem which not every government agency, particularly when in full cry against big business, can be trusted to solve.

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.

I’ll stop demonizing business when business stops putting their profits before the country and starts putting their workers before their greed.

The state has an active role to play in ensuring that there is equilibrium between the constituent parts of the economy, the consumers and the producers.

Regulation is useful and proper, when aimed at the prevention of fraud or contrivance, manifestly injurious to other kinds of production, or to the public safety, and not at prescribing the nature of the products and the methods of fabrication

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.

It is right to intervene when markets are not working and people are getting hurt.

For the working class of the world the choice is simple, either to take the organized political action necessary to introduce Socialism or to continue with capitalism. The one thing that cannot be had is to impose on the capitalist jungle some socially acceptable and satisfying wages policy.

It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract to require that when men receive from Government the privilege of doing business under corporate form, which frees them from individual responsibility, and enables them to call into their enterprises the capital of the public, they shall do so upon absolutely truthful representations as to the value of the property in which the capital is to be invested.

Look out for the trusts. I hate to leave you here alone with those dreadful corporations, but I can’t very well help it. Be careful of them and don’t let them hurt you while I am away.

it's not only companies who can undermine fair competition. Governments can do it, too. And governments do that when they hand out subsidies to just the favorite few, the selected. They may do that when they hand out subsidies -- and, of course, all financed by taxpayers -- to companies. That may be in the form of special tax treatments, like the tax benefits that firms like Fiat, Starbucks and Apple got from some governments in Europe. Those subsidies stop companies from competing on equal terms. They can mean that the companies that succeed, well, they are the companies that got the most subsidy, the ones that are the best-connected, and not, as it should be, the companies that serve consumers the best.