Thomas Sowell Quotes

Economic planning is nothing more than the forcible superseding of other people's plans by the powerful elite backed up by the brute force of government.

Government central planning means over-riding other people's plans.

The statists want to control the economy.

The party cannot relinquish its leading role in the economy.

No less than 50 percent of the means of production must be in the hands of the state.

The characteristic mark of this age of dictators, wars and revolutions is its anticapitalistic bias. Most governments and political parties were eager to restrict the sphere of private initiative and free enterprise.

Government planning always involves compulsion.

[Socialistic] economic planning, regulation, and intervention pave the way to totalitarianism by building a power structure that will inevitably be seized by the most power-hungry and unscrupulous.

Governments don't control things. A government can't control the economy without controlling people.

The more the state "plans" the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.

It doesn't require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property?

If you surrender everything to the government and give it total power to plan the whole economy, this will not guarantee your economic security, but it will guarantee the descent of the entire nation to a level of miserable poverty--as the practical results of every totalitarian economy, communist or fascist, have demonstrated.

It has been a long fight to put the control of our economic system in the hands of the government.

Americans are sick of the idea of the government taking over everything and trying to run it. We don't know how to run a bank, a car company.

Central planning, judicial activism, and the nanny state all presume vastly more knowledge than any elite have ever possessed.

We (British) have reached the state where the private sector is that part of the economy the government controls and the public sector is that part that nobody controls.

Socialism requires that government becomes your god.

There isn't much in the way of pure communist spirit, because the whole nation seems to be engaged in capitalistic enterprises. Much of the country still operates under government control.

Who can be against progress, after all? But it's a fraudulent use of the word - because for the Progressive, progress is marked not be how free you are, but how much government can 'do' for you.

No company fails in communist China, because they're all partly owned by the government.

If you want government to take everything, if you want government to take more and more over with the banks, more of the industries, all of a sudden you're going to have a government auto czar, right there, right down the line, that's socialism.

We will do whatever the government tells us to do, which is a critically important principle of the Chinese market economy, and there is nothing more for discussion about it.

When Government has a monopoly of all production and all distribution, as many Governments have, it can not permit any economic activity that competes with it.

Ownership of the means of production was an obsession to be abandoned. What mattered was the state’s control over the economy.

The more the government plans fail, the more the planners plan.