economic fallacy Quotes

Only economists mistake physical opulence for riches.

The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.

The ingenious slogan that the public debt does not matter because 'we owe it to ourselves' is clearly absurd.

What does one have to do today to reconcile France? Distribute public money - that's what some expect, especially the radical left. They think that you help people by handing them money. But that is a fallacy because it is not me distributing the money, but rather future generations.

Your money does not cause my poverty. Refusal to believe this is at the bottom of most bad economic thinking.

For they (capitalists) hold as their chief heresy, in a coarser form, the fundamental falsehood that things are not made to be used but made to be sold. All the collapse of their commercial system in their own time has been due to that fallacy of forcing things on a market where there was no market; of continually increasing the power of supply without increasing the power of demand; of briefly, of always considering the man who sells the potato and never considering the man who eats it.

I suspected economics was irredeemable as a policy tool for citizens groups. I saw economics lead its practitioners and citizens alike into a form of brain-damaging indoctrination.

The argument of the broken window pane is the most valuable argument in modern politics.

The most obvious and yet the oldest and most stubborn error on which the appeal of inflation rests is that of confusing ‘money’ with ‘wealth’…Real wealth, of course, consists in what is produced and consumed: the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in. It is railways and roads and motor cars; ships and planes and factories; schools and churches and theaters; pianos, paintings and books. Yet so powerful is the verbal ambiguity that confuses money with wealth, that even those who at times recognize the confusion will slide back into it in the course of their reasoning.

The problem is, of course, that not only is economics bankrupt but it has always been nothing more than politics in disguise ... economics is a form of brain damage.

Collectivism doesn't work because it's based on a faulty economic premise. There is no such thing as a person's "fair share" of wealth. The gross national product is not a pizza that must be carefully divided because if I get too many slices, you have to eat the box. The economy is expandable and, in any practical sense, limitless.

The notion that somehow through a trade war or protectionism or magical thinking that we're going to return to a romanticized economic past is, in the end, going to be an illusion. And a severe disappointment to millions of decent, hard-working people.

Whole new theories of money were growing here like mushrooms: in the dark and based on bullshit.

But there still prevails, even in nations well acquainted with commerce, a strong jealousy with regard to the balance of trade, and a fear, that all their gold and silver may be leaving them. This seems to me, almost in every case, a groundless apprehension; and I should as soon dread, that all our springs and rivers should be exhausted, as that money should abandon a kingdom where there are people and industry.

The Keynesian belief that 'demand' is always at the root of underemployment and slow growth is a fallacy.

There was a hope then by some people that what we call trickle-down economics would work. That if you made the economy pie bigger, everybody would benefit. Twenty-five years after NAFTA, we know that that is not true. We should have known then that it was not true.

Don't let anybody tell you it's corporations and businesses that create jobs.

One of society's absurd delusions is that the spending of money can cure something.

My message is that the counterclaim - which is that if wages go up, employment will go down - is a scam. It's a con job. It's an intimidation tactic. There is absolutely no evidence anywhere that it's true. On the contrary, where you find high wages you usually find low unemployment.

The idea that high wages equals low employment, it's absurd.

There may be few instances in which the superstition that only measurable magnitudes can be important has done positive harm in the economic field: but the present inflation and employment problems are a very serious one.

There is no more cruel illusion than that war makes a people richer.

The economic illusion is the belief that social justice is bad for economic growth.

To mistake money for wealth, is the same sort of error as to mistake the highway which may be the easiest way of getting to your house or lands, for the house and lands themselves.

The biggest public fallacy is that the market is always right. The market is nearly always wrong. I can assure you of that.