Quotes About Economics

What inflation really does is to change the relationships of prices and costs.

But need is not demand. Effective economic demand requires not merely need but corresponding purchasing power.

The thing so great that "private capital could not have built it" has in fact been built by private capital—the capital that was expropriated in taxes

Inflation itself is a form of taxation. It is perhaps the worst possible form, which usually bears hardest on those least able to pay.

So the government launches on a gigantic housing program—at the taxpayers' expense.

No one could think that the destruction of war was an economic advantage who began by thinking first of all of the people whose property was destroyed. Those

If, therefore, the X industry is driven out of existence by a minimum wage law, then the workers previously employed in that industry will be forced to turn to alternative courses that seemed less attractive to them in the first place.

The question is not whether we wish to see everybody as well off as possible. Among men of good will such an aim can be taken for granted. The real question concerns the proper means of achieving it. And in trying to answer this we must never lose sight of a few elementary truisms. We cannot distribute more wealth than is created. We cannot in the long run pay labor as a whole more than it produces.

unions, though they may for a time be able to secure an increase in money wages for their members, partly at the expense of employers and more at the expense of nonunionized workers, cannot, in the long-run and for the whole body of workers, increase real wages at all.

It is typical of government price-fixing schemes that they escape one undesired consequence only by plunging into another and usually worse one.

The typical political ploy was to load up benefits in the present and push costs into the future. Yet that future always arrived;

The thing so great that "private capital could not have built it" has in fact been built by private capital—the capital that was expropriated in taxes (or, if the money was borrowed, that eventually must be expropriated in taxes).

In every country it always is and must be the interest of the great body of the people to buy whatever they want of those who sell it cheapest.

people are becoming aware that government has nothing to give them without first taking it away from somebody else—or from themselves. Increased handouts to selected groups mean merely increased taxes, or increased deficits and increased inflation.

Who subsidizes the consumers will depend upon the incidence of taxation. But men in their role of taxpayers will be subsidizing themselves in their role of consumers. It becomes a little difficult to trace in this maze precisely who is subsidizing whom. What is forgotten is that subsidies are paid for by someone, and that no method has been discovered by which the community gets something for nothing.

The best wage rates for labor are not the highest wage rates, but the wage rates that permit full production, full employment and the largest sustained payrolls.

Therefore, for every public job created by the bridge project a private job has been destroyed somewhere else.

Proposals for an increased volume of credit, therefore, are merely another name for proposals for an increased burden of debt. They would seem considerably less inviting if they were habitually referred to by the second name instead of by the first.

one occupation can expand only at the expense of all other occupations.

what is really being lent is not money, which is merely the medium of exchange, but capital.

Prices are determined by supply and demand, and demand is determined by how intensely people want a commodity and what they have to offer in exchange for it.

What a commodity has cost to produce in the past cannot determine its value. That will depend on the present relationship of supply and demand.

Functional prices are those that encourage the largest volume of production and the largest volume of sales. Functional wages are those that tend to bring about the highest volume of employment and the largest real payrolls.

Effective economic demand requires not merely need but corresponding purchasing power.