Economic Tradeoff Quotes

Government can't give us anything without depriving us of something else.

I want consumers to connect the dots, to go to any store and look at the label and connect the dots between buying cheap China products, which is better for the wallet, and all the other things we lose, like jobs.

When any welfare scheme is being proposed, its political sponsors always dwell on what a generous and compassionate government should pay to Paul; they neglect to mention that this additional money must be seized from Peter.

It's the old adage: You can make a pizza so cheap, nobody will eat it. You can make an airline so cheap, nobody will fly it.

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

Over and over, we hear politicians say they can't spend our tax dollars on environmental protection when the economy is so fragile.

Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State's honey and avoiding the sting?

What I'm not saying is that all government spending is bad. It's not - far, far from it, but there is no free lunch, as a former colleague of mine used to say. There is no public tooth fairy. Father Christmas does not work on the Treasury staff this year. You can never bail someone out of trouble without putting someone else into trouble.

I have to spend my time worrying about poor families at the expense of helping businesses, or vice versa. To me, I really see that's the bridge I need to build.

If unemployment could be brought down to say 2 percent at the cost of an assured steady rate of inflation of 10 percent per year, or even 20 percent, this would be a good bargain.

Anything that's done to address unemployment in terms of massive stimulus spending is going to exacerbate deficits. And anything that's done to address deficits in the short-term is going to exacerbate unemployment.

In order that one industry might grow or come into existence, a hundred other industries would have to shrink.

We say we need to clean up the environment; to clean up the environment, we need to be richer. But maybe getting richer is actually making us poorer.

No Nation can encourage or enlarge its Proportion of any private and natural Manufacture, without discouraging the rest; because whether an Allowance be given, either to the Manufacturer, or Transporter, that Allowance serves, and is employed to attract the Workmen from those other Manufactures, which have some likeness to the encouraged Manufacture: So that what is transported of the encouraged Manufacture, beyond nature, only balances the Diminution of the others.

Donald Trump is withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement because he wants to lower environmental standards for American products and manufacture more cheaply. His reasoning is quite simple, but very shortsighted. It won't succeed because, by doing so, Trump is missing a golden opportunity to modernize American industry.