Quotes About Laissez-faire

The proper governmental policy in a depression is strict laissez-faire, including stringent budget slashing, and coupled perhaps with positive encouragement for credit contraction.

The laissez-faire argument relies on the same tacit appeal to perfection as does communism.

From Ayn Rand to bushy anarchists there is an occasional agreement on means called libertarianism, which is a faith in laissez-faire politics/economics.... How to hate your government on principle.

I mean, I've always been a libertarian. Leave everybody alone. Let everybody else do what they want. Just stay out of everybody else's hair.

The Gilded Age robber barons - the Goulds, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans and Rockefellers - did quite well under laissez-faire. Most of the rest of Americans were still stuck in the ditch, with little to no economic security, life expectancy of roughly 45 years, and horrific infant mortality rates that claimed 300 babies per 1,000 in the cities.

Cooperation is an intelligent functioning of the concept of laissez faire-a thorough conviction that nobody can get there unless everybody gets there.

I clearly believe a lot more than some of my coalition colleagues - Tories - in redistribution and using the tax system for that purpose. I also believe in the government having an active role in the economy, which is having an industrial strategy. I'm not a believer in laissez-faire.

It is not an accident that developing countries - virtually the whole of East Asia, for example - view the role of the state in a far more interventionist way than does the Anglo-Saxon world. Laissez-faire and free markets are the favoured means of the powerful and privileged.

If one rejects laissez faire on account of mans fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action.

Oh well, McWatt sang, what the hell.

I like the libertarian view, which is to leave everyone alone. Even as a kid, I was annoyed by people who wanted to tell everyone how to live.

This is the East Coast, boy. I know they're pretty laissez-faire about dress in your neck of the woods, but back here 52. they don't let you run around in your bathing suit all year long. Blacks and blues, that's the ticket, blacks and blues… (Bunny Corcoran to Richard Papen)

Just as the left has to be more willing to question 'Government knows best ' the right has to rethink its laissez-faire attitude toward government.

Global laissez-faire is not a conspiracy of corporate America. It is a tragedy - one of several that have occurred in the twentieth century - in which an hubristic ideology runs aground on enduring human needs that it has failed to comprehend.

But I also think the doctrine of laissez faire, carried to its extreme, is equally repugnant. Too many capitalists use laissez faire as an excuse to gouge the public and exploit the poor.

Like its bête noire, Marxism, laissez-faire economics claimed to be scientific, based upon immutable laws of nature, and also like Marxism, it has not stood the test of experience. If it were a scientific theory, it would have long ago been rejected.37 Free-market fundamentalism is an article of faith.

The doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest,"36 Soros wrote. Like its bête noire, Marxism, laissez-faire economics claimed to be scientific, based upon immutable laws of nature, and also like Marxism, it has not stood the test of experience. If it were a scientific theory, it would have long ago been rejected.

The billionaire investor George Soros has coined a term to describe this perspective: "free market fundamentalism." It is the belief not simply that free markets are the best way to run an economic system, but that free markets are the only way that will not ultimately destroy our other freedoms. "The doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest,"36 Soros wrote.

What I wish I had, is that I wish I was a little more Greek, in that I wish I could lose my North American driven attitude and that I could be a little bit more poetic and laissez faire.