Manipulating currencies is when you're going into the marketplace and buying something in large amounts to depress the value of the currency.
The Statist deflects public scorn for the consequences of his own central planning by blaming the very industry he is sabotaging for supply dislocations and price hikes.
The public subsidies provided to miners, loggers, and ranchers are as extravagant and as harmful to the public interest as the subsidies that the Federal Reserve and Treasury provide to the 'banks too big to fail.'
When the government gets involved in pricing, I don't think it's the right way to look at a business.
Many markets work best with little or no outside interference. But others - especially those subject to big 'externalities' - need a helping hand.
When governments manipulate exchange rates to affect currency markets, they undermine the honest efforts of countries that wish to compete fairly in the global marketplace. Supply and demand are distorted by artificial prices conveyed through contrived exchange rates. Businesses fail as legitimately earned profits become currency losses.
When democratic governments create economic calamity, free markets get the blame.
A minimum-wage law, a law that prevents employers and employees from entering into mutually beneficial economic exchanges, is as far from a free market or free enterprise as one can get. That's why it causes so much damage and destruction, especially to black teenagers and others whose labor, for one reason or another, is valued by employers at less than the government-established minimum wage.
When the Statist makes a wrong decision, its impact is far-reaching, for he uses the power of government to impose his decision on as many individuals and businesses as possible, which distorts the free market itself.
We should not have the U.S. government buying stock in American industries - the financial industry or any other industry.
I've made it very clear that the government should get out of the business of trying to affect the markets, of trying to pick winners and losers.
There are lots of levels of fear and complaint about the government getting involved in business. First and foremost, of course, is incompetence.
I think almost every economist would agree that government gets itself in trouble when it tries to interfere with voluntary behavior.
All varieties of interference with the market phenomena not only fail to achieve the ends aimed at by their authors and supporters, but bring about a state of affairs which - from the point of view of their authors and advocates valuations - is less desirable than the previous state of affairs which they were designed to alter.
Depressions and mass unemployment are not caused by the free market but by government interference in the economy.
There is simply no other choice than this: either to abstain from interference in the free play of the market, or to delegate the entire management of production and distribution to the government. Either capitalism or socialism: there exists no middle way.
Measures which serve to abridge the free competition of foreign Articles, have a tendency to occasion an enhancement of prices.
New markets shall not be allowed to interfere with the interests of former ones.
This was one of the grossest classic protectionist schemes.
The Obama administration's agenda of maximizing dependency involves political favoritism cloaked in the raiment of "economic planning" and "social justice" that somehow produce results superior to what markets produce when freedom allows merit to manifest itself, and incompetence to fail. The administration's central activity - the political allocation of wealth and opportunity - is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.
A general flat minimum-wage law for all industry is permissible, but I do not think that it is a particularly wise method of achieving the end. I know much better methods of providing a minimum for everybody. But once you turn from laying down a general minimum for all industry to decreeing particular and different minimum for different industries, then, of course, you make the price mechanism inoperative, because it is no longer the price mechanism which will guide people between industries and trades.
The great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation, and the great goal of the conservative movement, as it rose to triumph in the 1980s, was to remove that threat - to keep OSHA, the EPA, and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in the marketplace.
We do not assert that the capitalist mode of economic calculation guarantees the absolutely best solution of the allocation of factors of production. Such absolutely perfect solutions of any problem are out of reach of mortal men. What the operation of a market not sabotaged by the interference of compulsion and coercion can bring about is merely the best solution accessible to the human mind under the given state of technological knowledge and the intellectual abilities of the age's shrewdest men.
I always found the appeal to the market gods a bit odd. Why would the market fix mistakes instead of aggravating them?
Everywhere I travel around my home state of Wyoming - but also around the country - I continue to hear, 'How can Washington make us buy something we don't want to buy, a product? They can't tell us to buy breakfast cereal or something else - how can they do that?'
Almost everything wrong with our health care system comes from government interference with the free market. If the health care system is broken, then fix it. Don't try to invent a new one premised on all the bad ideas that are causing problems in the first place.