Economic Choice Quotes

Failure to use tax money to finance things not liked by the taxpaying public is routinely called ‘censorship.’ If such terminology were used consistently, virtually all of life would be just one long, unending censorship, as individuals choose whether to buy apples instead of oranges, vacations rather than violins, furniture rather than mutual funds. But of course no such consistency is intended. This strained use of the word ‘censorship’ appears only selectively, to describe public choices and values at variance with the choices and values of the anointed.

Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.

Would you rather have cheap, subsidized - illegally subsidized - goods dumped into the Wal-Mart and not have a job and not have your wages go up in 15 years, or would you like to pay a little bit more - not much - a little bit more, have a job, and have your wages going up? I think the American people are going to make that choice.

The average worker in 2015 wanting to attain the average living standard in 1915 could do so by working just 17 weeks a year, one third of the time. But most people don't choose to do that. They are willing to work hard to harvest the technological bounty that is available to them. Material abundance has never eliminated perceived scarcity.

Each dollar taxed and spent deprives Americans of the freedom to make their own choices.

Rather than showing themselves to be an ally to the middle class by ending the AMT or repealing it for years to come, my Republican colleagues refused to include it in today's legislation and America's middle class will surely suffer that choice greatly.

With taxes, if they aren't working right, we can change them with a stroke of the pen. It's basically a market-type mechanism. People make their own choices. You run the taxes, and you get the results.

If you ask the American people to choose, between public health and the economy, then it's no contest. No American is going to say, accelerate the economy, at the cost of human life. Because no American is going to say how much a life is worth. Job one has to be save lives. That has to be the priority.

I have no idea what's going to happen. Who knows - if they can't afford to buy a boat, maybe they buy a print. Who knows what happens with their buck?

Look, ideally I'd like to have free money to give to everybody. The reality is in government you have to choose and make decisions.

That is where the power, opportunity, and choice come from-when you have money. Money equals opportunity. There is no question.

If the choice is between cooking alive and wasting money unnecessarily I would rather waste some money, because long before we cook we are going to kill each other if we don't deal with climate change.

Taxation under every form presents but a choice of evils.

I think that for the developing world there are many versions of capitalism, and countries have to choose one that's appropriate.

Voluntary association produces the free market - where each person can choose among a multitude of possibilities.

Prosperity or egalitarianism—you have to choose. I favor freedom—you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.

If people fear that they have to choose between their job or fixing the climate, they will always protect their job. Because that's how they live to see tomorrow.

The problem with opportunity cost is that opportunity cost is divided among many, many things.

What farmers gain most of all from the increase in agricultural productivity, of course, is choice.

I'd rather be rich and miserable than poor and miserable.

Economists have the correct insight that economics is a theory of choice, the key to the story is the variety of options and centralised political control limits the options. The best recipe is adaptive efficiency coping with novel uncertainty in a non-ergodic world, the maintenance of institutions which enable trial & error experiment to occur, and an effective means of eliminating unsuccessful solutions

You have a choice of trusting the natural stability of gold, or the honesty and intelligence of members of government.

In a flat choice between smoke and jobs, we're for jobs... But just keep me out of trouble on environmental issues.

Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for the others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.

There are but three political-economic roads from which we can choose... We could take the first course and further exacerbate the already concentrated ownership of productive capital in the American economy. Or we could join the rest of the world by taking the second path, that of nationalization. Or we can take the third road, establishing policies to diffuse capital ownership broadly, so that many individuals, particularly workers, can participate as owners of industrial capital. The choice is ours.