Economic Inefficiency Quotes

Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them.

Subsidies are a shell game, not a net addition to national wealth.

The inefficiency of political control of an economy has been demonstrated more often, in more places, and under more varied conditions, than almost anything outside the realm of pure science.

The real case against socialism is not its economic inefficiency, though on all sides there is evidence of that. Much more fundamental is its basic immorality.

The historical experience of socialist countries has sadly demonstrated that collectivism does not do away with alienation but rather increases it, adding to it a lack of basic necessities and economic inefficiency.

When property is owned communally, everyone has an incentive to use it up quickly, before someone else does. No-one bothers to maintain or improve it, because their efforts will simply benefit others

Doing good with other people's money has two basic flaws. In the first place, you never spend anybody else's money as carefully as you spend your own. So a large fraction of that money is inevitably wasted. In the second place, and equally important, you cannot do good with other people's money unless you first get the money away from them. So that force - sending a policeman to take the money from somebody's pocket - is fundamentally at the basis of the philosophy of the welfare state.

The extravagant expenditure of public money is an evil not to be measured by the value of that money to the people who are taxed for it.

No slave system has ever been able to continue to function on the slaves provided by its own biological reproduction because the rate of human reproduction is too slow and the expense from infant mortality and years of unproductive upkeep of the young make this prohibitively expensive. This relationship is one of the basic causes of the American Civil War, and was even more significant in destroying ancient Rome.

I never saw a bureaucracy produce a single barrel of oil.

North Korea faded to black in the early 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea's creakily inefficient economy collapsed. Power stations rusted into ruin.

The rage for railroads is so great that many will be laid in parts where they will not pay.

Government subsidies can be critically analyzed according to a simple principle: You are smarter than the government, so when the government pays you to do something you wouldn't do on your own, it is almost always paying you to do something stupid.

The market doesn't work very well when it comes to public goods.

Corruption exists because there is too much, not too little, market.

Government is the ultimate monopoly. And monopolies, as any economist will tell you, often breed complacency and a lack of innovation.

Anyplace market forces have been artificially removed by the government there is a total absence of incentives, competition, effective oversight, cost controls and so on.

Corruption has reached an unacceptable level. It devours resources that could be devoted to the citizens. It impedes the proper carrying out of market rules and penalizes the honest and capable.

Many governments are giving subsidies to fossil fuel production and consumption that encourage greenhouse gas emissions, at the same time as they are spending on projects to promote clean energy. This is a wasteful use of scarce budget resources.

You can't get good Chinese takeout in China and Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba. That's all you need to know about communism.

There is an intrinsic linkage between socialism and economic inefficiency.

Watching the economies in various parts of the world, I believe that there is scope for improvement everywhere. There is some corruption and inefficiency everywhere.

Overly restrictive regulations not only stifle the private sector; they also ultimately hurt consumers.

Ironically, in the full-fledged transfer society, where governments busy themselves redistributing income by means of hundreds of distinct programs, hardly anyone is better off as a result.

Politics doesn't work. Look at the parts of America where government has had the most power, where government has spent the most money. Look at the housing projects we've got the poor people in.