Quotations Against Regulation

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The document contains quotations by notable economists, politicians, and other commentators

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Quotations Against Regulation
The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that
caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder.
– Frederic Bastiat
If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit
people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are
always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong
to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a
finer clay than the rest of mankind?
– Frederic Bastiat
But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you-the social
reformers-see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat
them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.
– Isaiah Berlin
Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals
or groups (or tribes or states or nations or churches) that he or she or they
are in sole possession of the truth: especially about how to live, what to be
and do – and that those who differ from them are not merely mistaken, but
wicked or mad: and need restraining or suppressing.
– Isaiah Berlin
No perfect solution is, not merely in practice, but in principle, possible in
human affairs, and any determined attempt to produce it is likely to lead to
suffering, disillusionment and failure.
– Isaiah Berlin
I can’t remember [of a good regulation]. Regulation of transport,
regulation of agriculture — agriculture is a, zoning is z. You know, you go
from a to z, they are all bad. There were so many studies, and the result
was quite universal: The effects were bad
– Ronald Coase

The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment,
was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent
instability of the private economy.
– Milton Friedman
So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear. That there is no
alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary
people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed
by a free enterprise system.
– Milton Friedman
The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting,
in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from
centralized government.
– Milton Friedman
Your America is doing many things in the economic field which we found
out caused us so much trouble. You are trying to control people’s lives.
And no country can do that part way. I tried it and failed. Nor can any
country do it all the way either. I tried that, too, and it failed.
– Hermann Goering
If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that
the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the
use of coercion.
– Friedrich August von Hayek
The credit which the apparent conformity with recognized scientific
standards can gain for seemingly simple but false theories may, as the
present instance shows, have grave consequences.
– Friedrich August von Hayek
I do not think it is an exaggeration to say history is largely a history of
inflation, usually inflations engineered by governments for the gain of
governments.
– Friedrich August von Hayek

The more the state “plans” the more difficult planning becomes for the
individual.
– Friedrich August von Hayek
It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men
determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on
doing evil.
– Friedrich August von Hayek
The solution to our problems is not more paternalism, laws, decrees, and
controls, but the restoration of liberty and free enterprise, the restoration of
incentives, to let loose the tremendous constructive energies of 300 million
Americans.
– Henry Hazlitt
Arbitrary government power is being multiplied daily by the now
practically unchallenged assumption that wherever there is any problem of
any kind to be solved, government is the agency to step in and solve it.
– Henry Hazlitt
The more things a government undertakes to do, the fewer things it can do
completely. When the government tries to do everything it must do
everything badly.
– Henry Hazlitt
For every alleged benefit that the politicians confer upon us, they must
necessarily deprive us of something else.
– Henry Hazlitt
There is no more certain way to deter employment than to harass and
penalize employers.
– Henry Hazlitt

The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and
robbers there will be.
– Lao Tzu
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the
most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under
omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes
sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us
for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the
approval of their own conscience.
– C. S. Lewis
Government has no other end, but the preservation of property.
– John Locke
The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge
freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of law, where there
is no law, there is no freedom.
– John Locke
Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of
oppression. In our Governments, the real power lies in the majority of the
Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be
apprehended, not from the acts of Government contrary to the sense of its
constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere
instrument of the major number of the constituents.
– James Madison
How will the remaining portion of the community like to have the
amusements that shall be permitted to them regulated by the religious and
moral sentiments of the stricter Calvinists and Methodists? Would they
not, with considerable peremptoriness, desire these intrusively pious
members of society to mind their own business? This is precisely what
should be said to every government and every public, who have the
pretension that no person shall enjoy any pleasure which they think wrong.
– John Stuart Mill

…the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or
collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number,
is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully
exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to
prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a
sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear
because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier,
because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right.
These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him,
or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or
visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the
conduct from which it is desired to deter him, must be calculated to
produce evil to some one else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for
which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part
which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute.
Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
!– John Stuart Mill
State interference in economic life, which calls itself economic policy, has
done nothing but destroy economic life. Prohibitions and regulations have
by their general obstructive tendency fostered the growth of the spirit of
wastefulness.
– Ludwig von Mises
Manufacturing and commercial monopolies owe their origin not to a
tendency imminent in a capitalist economy but to governmental
interventionist policy directed against free trade and laissez faire.
– Ludwig von Mises
The trouble with government regulation of the market is that it prohibits
capitalistic acts between consenting adults.
– Robert Nozick

A businessman cannot force you to buy his product; if he makes a mistake,
he suffers the consequences; if he fails, he takes the loss. A bureaucrat
forces you to obey his decisions, whether you agree with him or not—and
the more advanced the stage of a country’s statism, the wider and more
discretionary the powers wielded by a bureaucrat. If he makes a mistake,
you suffer the consequences; if he fails, he passes the loss on to you, in the
form of heavier taxes.
– Ayn Rand
When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion –
when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from
men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those
who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get richer by
graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against
them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being
rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your
society is doomed.
– Ayn Rand
All the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to businessmen and
to capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy or by a free
market, but by government intervention into the economy.
– Ayn Rand
The right way is the greatest gratifier of human wishes ever come upon –
when allowed to operate. It is as morally sound as the Golden Rule. It is
the way of willing exchange, of common consent, of self-responsibility, of
open opportunity. It respects the right of each to the product of his labor. It
limits the police force to keeping the peace. It is the way of the free
market, private property, limited government. On its banner is emblazoned
Individual Liberty.
– Leonard Read

It is not the business of the law – even if this were practically possible,
which is, of course, most unlikely – to make anyone good or reverent or
moral or clean or upright.
– Murray Rothbard
…all government operation is wasteful, inefficient, and serves the
bureaucrat rather than the consumer.
– Murray Rothbard
It is doubtless very desirable, that private persons should have a correct
knowledge of their personal interests; but it must be infinitely more so, that
governments should possess that knowledge.
– Jean-Baptiste Say
The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is that
of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains
his frauds and corrects his negligence.
– Adam Smith
The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own
conceit; and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own
ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from
any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts,
without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices
which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the
different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand
arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that
the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides
that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-
board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its
own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to
impress upon it.
– Adam Smith

He who seeks to regulate everything by law is more likely to arouse vices
than to reform them. It is best to grant what cannot be abolished, even
though it be in itself harmful. How many evils spring from luxury, envy,
avarice, drunkenness and the like, yet these are tolerated because they
cannot be prevented by legal enactments.
– Baruch Spinoza
…when the state was most corrupt, laws were most abundant.
– Tacitus
Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of
society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most
original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does
not tyrannize but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies
a!people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid
and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
– Alexis de Tocqueville
The government is merely a servant―merely a temporary servant; it
cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and
decide who is a patriot and who isn’t. Its function is to obey orders, not
originate them.
– Mark Twain