Market Intervention Quotes

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

Contrary to the vision of the left, it was the free market which produced affordable housing - before government intervention made housing unaffordable.

A shortage is a sign that somebody is keeping the price artificially lower than it would be if supply and demand were allowed to operate freely.

Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.

We economists don't know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can't sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly you'll have a tomato shortage. It's the same with oil or gas.

When markets fail, as they often do, collective action becomes imperative.

They say that open markets are the solution to everything and, if left alone, the invisible hand will solve all problems. Sadly, the reason the invisible hand often appears invisible is that, quite often, it is not there.

Social Security, which transformed life for the elderly in this country, was 'socialist.' The concept of the 'minimum wage' was seen as a radical intrusion into the marketplace and was described as 'socialist.'

We don't pay miners not to mine, and we shouldn't pay farmers not to farm.

Sugar protectionism is government planning, It is industrial policy—government picking winners and losers—applied to agriculture.

No matter how deeply wedded one may be to the free enterprise system (and I, for one, am wedded for life), one has to accept the need for positive government; one has to consider government action on a sizable scale as desirable rather than as a necessary evil.

Government isn't there just to administer life support to failing markets. Without the government, many of those markets would not even exist.

Government 'help' to business is just as disastrous as government persecution... the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.

It was an interesting question as to whether the BBC had a future in the digital world, and what form of market failure could justify the licence fee system.

There are certain domains which are so vital to the well-being of citizens that they must be kept out of the private sector and the law of supply and demand.

Subsidies should never be a permanent feature of any market. They should be introduced only to address market failure and they should be withdrawn gradually as those distortions in the market are addressed.

The great virtue of a free market is that it enables people who hate each other, or who are from vastly different religious or ethnic backgrounds, to cooperate economically. Government intervention can't do that.

Thus, the isolated interference with one or a few prices of consumer goods always bring about effects-and this is important to realize-which are even less satisfactory than the conditions that prevailed before.

Free competition and the open market system as they were known in the old days, have lost their places in the system, and that the only substitute for them, in these modern times, is government regulation and control.

Minimum wage laws make it illegal for a worker to accept a job that pays less, even if the worker needs that job.

I had to abandon free market principles in order to save the free market system.

Mainstream economic theories popular in the last several decades have tended to downplay the government's role in markets and to increase skepticism about even that more limited role. Austerity, particularly in Europe, has added to the problem. It has not worked, even on its own terms.

While admirers of capitalism, we also to a certain extent believe it has limitations that require government intervention in markets to make them work.

I have faith in the market when we get the rules right.

It is right to intervene when markets are not working and people are getting hurt.