Herman Daly Quotes

When markets fail, as they often do, collective action becomes imperative.

That invisible hand of Adam Smith seems to offer an extended middle finger to an awful lot of people.

While admirers of capitalism, we also to a certain extent believe it has limitations that require government intervention in markets to make them work.

Finally, let's keep well in mind the most important lesson of the auto rescue: While government should stay away from the private sector as much as possible, markets do occasionally fail, and when they do government can play a constructive role, as it did in the case of the auto rescue.

Will capitalist economies operate at full employment in the absence of routine intervention? Certainly not. Are deviations from full employment a social problem? Obviously.

Markets that don't work we're going to step away from.

There is no pure free-market economy.

However, leaving everything to the market is not necessarily good for society.

I am just as anxious as Mr. Brandeis can be, to have trade regulated by competition as far as possible; but as a matter of fact, competition has broken down hopelessly in this country to adequately control prices, to adequately control quality, and we all know it… it is the theory regarding competition that it will regulate prices and quality; that it will give us reasonable prices and superior quality. That is a beautiful theory. But if this theory has ever corresponded to the facts in the past (and this I doubt) we may be sure that in the future it will never again do so.

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

The free market is the most efficient for utilizing resources and responding to needs, but there are many human needs which find no place on the market.

They say that open markets are the solution to everything and, if left alone, the invisible hand will solve all problems. Sadly, the reason the invisible hand often appears invisible is that, quite often, it is not there.

Markets don’t always self-correct fast enough. Until they do there is an immense amount of damage that has been done which is why we need government intervention.

Markets are smart and governments are dumb.

We want free markets, but the markets are not going to take care of themselves in all cases.

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

Markets, when left to themselves, can sort of slip into being just the private property of big businesses and cartels, meeting the needs of some businesses and not the needs of customers.

I want the market to work if it can, and most of the time it will, but not without some pain.

I'm not speaking in favor of killing innovation. I'm speaking in favor of centrist use of the market, which involves necessarily a considerable degree of regulation. Markets by themselves will get themselves inevitably into inequality and into their own destruction. It will happen again and again.

Capitalism has shortfalls. It doesn't necessarily take care of the poor, and it underfunds innovation, so we have to offset that.

Subsidies should never be a permanent feature of any market. They should be introduced only to address market failure and they should be withdrawn gradually as those distortions in the market are addressed.

The invectives against capital in the hands of those who have it are double-faced, and when turned about are nothing but demands for capital in the hands of those who have it not, in order that they may do with it just what those who have it now are doing with it.

How can thinking people believe that a government that cannot deliver the mail can deliver gas better than Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Gulf, and the rest?

Government does not do ANYthing as well as the private sector does, and that includes educating your children.

I'm a little embarrassed about how long it took me to see the folly of most government intervention. It was probably 15 years before I really woke up to the fact that almost everything government attempts to do, it makes worse.