Laissez Faire Quotes

“Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day.

Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

Steal a fish from one guy and give it to another--and keep doing that on a daily basis--and you'll make the first guy pissed off, but you'll make the second guy lazy and dependent on you. Then you can tell the second guy that the first guy is greedy for wanting to keep the fish he caught. Then the second guy will cheer for you to steal more fish. Then you can prohibit anyone from fishing without getting permission from you. Then you can expand the racket, stealing fish from more people and buying the loyalty of others. Then you can get the recipients of the stolen fish to act as your hired thugs. Then you can ... well, you know the rest.”
― Larken Rose

“Socialism is an alternative to capitalism as potassium cyanide is an alternative to water.”
― Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics

“The truth is, one who seeks to achieve freedom by petitioning those in power to give it to him has already failed, regardless of the response.
To beg for the blessing of “authority” is to accept that the choice is the master’s alone to make, which means that the person is already, by definition, a slave.”
― Larken Rose

“But who would build the roads if there were no government?

You mean to tell me that 300 million people in this country and 7 billion people on the planet would just sit around in their houses and think “Gee, I’d like to go visit Fred, but I can't because there isn’t a flat thing outside for me to drive on, and I don’t know how to build it and the other 300 million or 7 billion people can’t possibly do it because there aren’t any politicians and tax collectors. If they were here then we could do it. If they were here to boss us around and steal our money and really inefficiently build the flat places, then we would be set. Then I would be comfortable and confident that I could get places. But I can’t go to Fred’s house or the market because we can’t possibly build a flat space from A to B. We can make these really small devices that enable us to contact people from all over the word that fits in our pockets; we can make machines that we drive around in, but no, we can’t possibly build a flat space.”
― Larken Rose

“Whenever someone starts talking about 'fair competition' or indeed, about 'fairness' in general, it is time to keep a sharp eye on your wallet, for it is about to be picked.”
― Murray N. Rothbard

“What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long.”
― Thomas Sowell

“When enough people understand reality, tyrants can literally be ignored out of existence. They can't ever be voted out of existence.”
― Larken Rose

“There is nothing virtuous or noble about being "tolerant" of people whose attitudes and behaviors you approve of. If you don't defend the freedom of even those individuals whose attitudes and behaviors you find disgusting, narrow-minded and offensive, then you are not tolerant. To "tolerate" doesn't mean you like it or approve of it; it means only that you ALLOW it to EXIST--i.e., you refrain from violently interfering. The people who look to "government" to FORCE people to be "nice" are not tolerant.”
― Larken Rose

“Property taxes' rank right up there with 'income taxes' in terms of immorality and destructiveness. Where 'income taxes' are simply slavery using different words, 'property taxes' are just a Mafia turf racket using different words. For the former, if you earn a living on the gang's turf, they extort you. For the latter, if you own property in their territory, they extort you. The fact that most people still imagine both to be legitimate and acceptable shows just how powerful authoritarian indoctrination is. Meanwhile, even a brief objective examination of the concepts should make anyone see the lunacy of it. 'Wait, so every time I produce anything or trade with anyone, I have to give a cut to the local crime lord??' 'Wait, so I have to keep paying every year, for the privilege of keeping the property I already finished paying for??' And not only do most people not make such obvious observations, but if they hear someone else pointing out such things, the well-trained Stockholm Syndrome slaves usually make arguments condoning their own victimization. Thus is the power of the mind control that comes from repeated exposure to BS political mythology and propaganda.”
― Larken Rose

“Dear Anarcho-Communist,

If you and I ever find ourselves in a stateless society, have no fear. Just mention that you are a communist, and I promise I will never try to "oppress" and "exploit" you by offering to trade with you, or by offering to pay you to do work.

Sincerely,

Larken Rose”
― Larken Rose

“Just as war is the natural consequence of monopoly, peace is the natural consequence of liberty.”
― Gustave de Molinari

“Private property is redundant. "Public property" is an oxymoron. All legit property is private. If property isn't private it's stolen.”
― Gustave de Molinari

“Think what it implies when you say that a country needs leaders. In your day-to-day life, you interact with all sorts of other individuals. And that's all society is: the collective name for lots of INDIVIDUALS. But for some inexplicable reason, we're taught to believe that one huge, arbitrarily chosen assortment of individuals (the "citizens" of one human livestock farm--I mean, "country") need some control freaks acting as intermediaries in order to interact with a different arbitrarily chosen assortment of individuals (the "citizens" of some other human livestock farm--I mean, "country"). Because gee, how could I and some random person in the middle of China possibly leave each other alone if we didn't each have a gang of narcissistic sociopaths claiming to "represent" us? Oh, wait a minute. That's exactly how and why pretty much ALL wars happen: because different gangs of power-happy psychos pit their pawns against each other in violent conflict, while claiming to "represent" subsets of humanity. One more example of how "government" is a problem posing as its own solution.”
― Larken Rose

“In particular, the State has arrogated to itself a compulsory monopoly over police and military services, the provision of law, judicial decision-making, the mint and the power to create money, unused land ("the public domain"), streets and highways, rivers and coastal waters, and the means of delivering mail...the State relies on control of the levers of propaganda to persuade its subjects to obey or even exalt their rulers.”
― Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty

“The government enforces a monopoly over the production and distribution of its alleged 'services' and brings violence to bear against would-be competitors. In so doing, it reveals the fraud at the heart of its impudent claims and gives sufficient proof that it is not a genuine protector, but a mere protection racket.”
― Robert Higgs

“Countries adopting free-market capitalism have increased output 70-fold, halved work days and doubled lifespans.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“The criminal excesses of unlimited capitalistic liberty had soon been checked thanks to the unlimited liberty of the press.”
― Salvador de Madariaga, Essays with a Purpose

“It rests on the attempt since the 1970s to translate a pathological degeneration of the principle of laissez-faire into economic reality by the systematic retreat of states from any regulation or control of the activities of profit-making enterprise. This attempt to hand over human society to the (allegedly) self-controlling and wealth- or even welfare-maximising market, populated (allegedly) by actors in rational pursuit of their interests, had no precedent in any earlier phase of capitalist development in any developed economy, not even the USA. It was a reductio ad absurdum of what its ideologists read into Adam Smith, as the correspondingly extremist 100% state-planned command economy of the USSR was of what the Bolsheviks read into Marx.”
― Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism

“This is not necessarily true, however, of measures merely restricting the allowed methods of production, so long as these restrictions affect all potential producers equally and are not used as an indirect way of controlling prices and quantities. Though all such controls of the methods of production impose extra costs (i.e., make it necessary to use more resources to produce a given output), they may be well worth while. To prohibit the use of certain poisonous substances or to require special precautions in their use, to limit working hours or to require certain sanitary arrangements, is fully compatible with the preservation of competition. The only question here is whether in the particular instance the advantages gained are greater than the social costs which they impose. Nor is the preservation of competition incompatible with an extensive system of social services — so long as the organization of these services is not designed in such a way as to make competition ineffective over wide fields.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

“No. Rien à faire. Rien. Faut pas penser. Faut accepter.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“If I had a dollar for every single time [Stephen Malkmus] said, 'it doesn’t matter', I wouldn’t have to work.”
― Bryan Charles, Wowee Zowee

“The act of our creation is equal for all of us. The results of our creation are not. The goal of our Founding Fathers was to treat everyone equally under the law, and as such, provide for equality of opportunity, not results.”
― A.E. Samaan

“A great deal of the talk about laissez faire [in the nineteenth century] must be discounted, or at least put into its proper context. In many cases the argument concealed an admission that a problem was insoluble, or that it must be endured, because no one could think of any method of solving it. From this point of view, the policy of laissez faire was not the result of a new and optimistic belief in the progress of society through private enterprise. It was rather an acknowledgement that the fund of skill and experience at the service of society was limited, and that, in the management of their common a airs, men would not be able to find the elasticity and adaptiveness [sic] which individuals showed in devising schemes for their own self-interest. e treatment of social and economic questions was more haphazard and empirical than Englishmen were ready to acknowledge. If a practical solution suggested itself, if a tentative experiment could be made, the doctrine of laissez faire would be thrust aside, only to be used again after another failure to discover the way out of a difficulty (Woodward, [1938] 1962 , p. 16).”
― Vito Tanzi, Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality

“It is easy to see, however,―as has been indicated more than once by anarchist writers, and lately by the French professor, V. Basch, in an interesting work, Anarchist Individualism: Max Stirner (1904, in French)―that this sort of individualism, aiming as it does at the "full development," not of all members of society, but of those only who would be considered as the most gifted ones, without caring for the right of full development for all―is merely a disguised return towards the now-existing education-monopoly of the few. It simply means a "right to their full development" for the privileged minorities. But, as such monopolies cannot be maintained otherwise than under the protection of a monopolist legislation and an organized coercion by the State, the claims of these individualists necessarily end in a return to the state idea and to that same coercion which they so fiercely attack themselves. Their position is thus the same as that of Spencer, and of all so-called "Manchester school" of economists, who also begin by a severe criticism of the State and end in its full recognition in order to maintain the property monopolies, of which the State is the necessary stronghold.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings

“Neoliberalism is essentially an intentionally imprecise stand-in term for free market economics, for economic sciences in general, for conservatism, for libertarians and anarchists, for authoritarianism and militarism, for advocates of the practice of commodification, for center-left or market-oriented progressivism, for globalism and welfare state social democracies, for being in favor of or against increased immigration, for favoring trade and globalization or opposing the same, or for really any set of political beliefs that happen to be disliked by the person(s) using the term.”
― Phillip W. Magness

“The essence of the Industrial Revolution consists in the triumph of this principle over the medieval and mercantilist regulations. Modern economy first begins with the introduction of the principle of laissez-faire, and the idea of individual freedom first succeeds in establishing itself as the ideology of this economic liberalism. These connections do not, of course, prevent both the idea of labour and the idea of freedom from developing into independent ethical forces and from often being interpreted in a really idealistic sense. But to realize how small a part was played by idealism in the rise of economic liberalism, it is only necessary to recall that the demand for freedom of trade was directed, above all, against the skilled master, in order to take away from him the only advantage he had over 55 the mere contractor. Adam Smith himself was still far from claiming such idealistic motives for the justification of free competition; on the contrary, he saw in human selfishness and the pursuit of personal interests the best guarantee for the smooth functioning of the economic organism and the realization of the general weal. The whole optimism of the enlightenment was bound up with this belief in the selfregulating power of economic life and the automatic adjustment of conflicting interests; as soon as this began to disappear, it became more and more difficult to identify economic freedom with the interests of the general weal and to regard free competition as a universal blessing.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism

“If there is much to be said for the virtues of the free market, for its role in encouraging hard work, innovation, and economic growth--and argument that seems nearly beyond dispute at this point--then it must also be acknowledged as equally indisputable that organizing an economic system around self-interest and competition tends to produce a multitude of so-called neighborhood effects. No one has yet to solve the conundrum of the ecological costs associated with economic growth without conceiving of some role of state intervention. Thus far, the notion that unrestrained capitalism can make the United States fabulously wealthy and save the planet too remains little more than a pipe dream.”
― Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History

“But the principles of laissez-faire have had other allies besides economic textbooks. It must be admitted that they have been confirmed in the minds of sound thinkers and the reasonable public by the poor quality of the opponent proposals - protectionism on one hand, and Marxian socialism on the other. Yet these doctrines are both characterised, not only or chiefly by their infringing the general presumption in favour of laissez-faire, but by mere logical fallacy. Both are examples of poor thinking, of inability to analyse a process and follow it out to its conclusion. The arguments against them, though reinforced by the principle of laissez-faire, do not strictly require it. Of the two, protectionism is at least plausible, and the forces making for its popularity are nothing to wonder at. But Marxian socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of opinion - how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men and, through them, the events of history. At any rate, the obvious scientific deficiencies of these two schools greatly contributed to the prestige and authority of nineteenth-century laissez-faire.”
― John Maynard Keynes, End of Laissez Faire

“The only ‘fair’ is laissez-faire, always and forever.”
― Dmitri Brooksfield, The Tenets of Dmitrism