Quotes About Economics

Weighing benefits against costs is the way most people make decisions — and the way most businesses make decisions, if they want to stay in business. Only in government is any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large.

No matter how much people on the left talk about compassion, they have no compassion for the taxpayers.

Where recyling takes place only in response to political pressures and exhortations, it need not meet the test of being incrementally worth its incremental costs. Accordingly, studies of government-imposed recycling programs in the United States have shown that what they salvage is usually worth less than the cost of salvaging it.

The government is indeed an institution, but the market is nothing more than an option for each individual to chose among numerous existing institutions, or to fashion new arrangements suited to his own situation and taste.

While "greed" is one of the most popular—and most fallacious—explanations of the very high salaries of corporate executives, when your salary depends on what other people are willing to pay you, you can be the greediest person on earth and that will not raise your pay in the slightest. Any serious explanation of corporate executives' salaries must be based on the reasons for those salaries being offered, not the reasons why the recipients desire them.

People who want special taxes or subsidies for particular things seem not to understand that what they are really asking for is for the prices to misstate the relative scarcities of things and the relative values that the users of these things put on them. One

Price controls almost invariably produce black markets, where prices are not only higher than the legally permitted prices, but also higher than they would be in a free market, since the legal risks must also be compensated. While small-scale black markets may function in secrecy, large-scale black markets usually require bribes to officials to look the other way.

prices are not costs. Prices are what pay for costs.

In short, rent control reduces the rate of housing turnover.

Minimum wage laws appear to give low-income workers something for nothing—and appearances are what count in politics. Realities can be left to others, so long as appearances get votes.

Empirically, political activity and political success have been neither necessary nor sufficient for economic advancement. Nor has eager political participation or outstanding success in politics been translated into faster group achievement.

People who depict markets as cold, impersonal institutions, and their own notions as humane and compassionate, have it directly backwards. It is when people make their own economic decisions, taking into account costs that matter to themselves, and known only to themselves, that this knowledge becomes part of the trade-odds they choose, whether as consumers or producers.

All that the government can do in reality is change the tax rate. How much tax revenue that will produce depends on how people react.

Today, poverty in America means whatever government statisticians in Washington say it means.

The fact that work is cheaper in Dubai than in Japan is not just a fluke. Work is more productive in richer countries. That is one of the reasons these countries are generally more prosperous. Selling used equipment from rich countries to poor countries can be an efficient way to handle the situation for both types of countries.

Some years ago, in my syndicated column, I challenged anyone to name any economist, of any school of thought, who had actually advocated a "trickle down" theory. No one quoted any economist, politician or person in any other walk of life who had ever advocated such a theory, even though many readers named someone who claimed that someone else had advocated it, without being able to quote anything actually said by that someone else. 2

China and India have been striking examples of poor countries whose abandonment of severe international trade and investment restrictions led to dramatic increases in their economic growth rates, which in turn led to tens of millions of their citizens rising out of poverty.

Eventually, however, the fact that many once-poor places like Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore achieved prosperity through freer international trade and investment became so blatant and so widely known that, by the end of the twentieth century, the governments of many other countries began abandoning their zero-sum view of economic transactions.

In 1962, Democratic President John F. Kennedy, like both Democratic and Republican Presidents and Secretaries of the Treasury in earlier years, pointed out that "it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.

opportunity alone is not sufficient for economic or other accomplishments.

Surrogate decision making is the common thread in the highly disparate crusades which have captured the imagination and sparked the fervor of the anointed at various times, whether this moral surrogacy was in the form of the eugenics movement, Keynesian economics, or environmentalism. All urgently require the superior wisdom of the anointed to be imposed on the benighted masses, in order to avert disaster.

Put in different terms, profit is the price paid for efficiency. Clearly, the increase in efficiency must be greater than the profit, or else socialism would in practice have resulted in more affordable prices and greater prosperity, as its theorists hoped, but the latter never materialized in the real world.

Many desirable things are advocated without regard to the most fundamental fact of economics, that resources are inherently limited and have alternative uses. Who could be against health, safety, or open space? But each of these things is open-ended, while resources are not only limited but have alternative uses which are also valuable.

At various times and places, particular individuals have argued that existing tax rates are so high that the government could collect more tax revenues if it lowered those tax rates, because the changed incentives would lead to more economic activity, resulting in more tax revenues out of rising incomes, even though the tax rate was lowered.