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Capitalism is not a Ponzi scheme. Capitalism is a scheme of free markets.
Sep 10, 2025
I think our basic principle that this is a free market system and that that has worked for us, that it creates innovation and risk taking, I think that's a principle that we've gotta hold to as well. But what I don't wanna do is get bottled up in a lot of ideology and is this conservative or liberal. My interest is finding something that works.
I believe, unlike people that are totally free-market, laissez-faire fundamentalists, that there is an important role that the government can play - one, in providing public goods, whether it's education, health care, or other things, and two, supervising countercyclical policy - stimulus, whether it's monetary, fiscal, or otherwise.
You can use principles of the free market to drive social change.
Pat Buchanan has emerged as the prophet and forerunner of a real economic nationalism on the right, and Donald Trump is now its tribune. This is not movement ideology which is all about limited government, the power of free markets and also internationally - globalism.
The policy of letting the free market determine the height of wage rates is the only reasonable and successful full-employment policy.
The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it.
Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.
Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.
I do understand the free market, having my economics degree, and if someone on the right had some good ideas, I'm not so dogmatic that I wouldn't listen to them.
American future lies in the East. The great free markets of the Pacific Rim are the American destiny.
In the long run we are all dead.
I am absolutely a free marketeer and I believe the creation of wealth is a good thing and anyone who doesn't really needs to have their head examined - otherwise where are we going to get the schools, the roads, the universities, the third runway, dare I say it?
While free markets tend to democratize a society, unfettered capitalism leads invariably to corporate control of government.
Columbus did not seek a new route to the Indies in response to a majority directive.
The reason this system can’t be overthrown in this country,” Walter said, “is all about freedom. The reason the free market in Europe is tempered by socialism is that they’re not so hung up on personal liberties there. They also have lower population growth rates, despite comparable income levels. The Europans are all-around more rational, basically. And the conversation about rights in this country isn’t rational. It’s taking place on the level of emotion, and class resentments, which is why the right is so good at exploiting it.
The Conservative sees in the free market the harmony of interests and rules of cooperation that also underlie the civil society.
The only salvation of the world today... is the rapid dissemination of the basic values of the West, that is, the ideas of democracy, human rights, the civil society, and the free market.
I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible.
Secondly, as a result of this political favoritism, the FDA has become a primary factor in that formula whereby cartel-oriented companies in the food and drug industry are able to use the police powers of government to harass or destroy their free-market competitors.
The economic miracle that has been the United States was not produced by socialized enterprises, by government-unon-industry cartels or by centralized economic planning. It was produced by private enterprises in a profit-and-loss system. And losses were at least as important in weeding out failures, as profits in fostering successes. Let government succor failures, and we shall be headed for stagnation and decline.
There is no free market for oil. It's controlled by a cartel, OPEC.
I think on the efficiency level, not only the distribution level, capitalism is a flawed system. It probably has the same virtues as Churchill attributed to democracy: It's the worst system except for any other. And I think that's right, but it cannot be thought that some unmitigated belief in free markets is a cure even from the efficiency point of view.
It is not uncommon to suppose that the free exchange of property in markets and capitalism are one and the same. They are not. While capitalism operates through the free market, free markets don't require capitalism.
In the whole history of capitalism, no one has been able to establish a coercive monopoly by means of competition in a free market...Every single coercive monopoly that exists or ever has existed...was created and made possible only by an act of government...which granted special privileges (not obtainable in a free market) to a man or a group of men, and forbade all others to enter that particular field.
I can't concern myself with how viewers feel.
It is a law of nature that everything run by the government will get more expensive and worse over time. Everything run by the private sector will get better and cheaper over time. The fact that [Obamacare] starts this badly does not bode well....We want healthcare run on the same system that gave us cell phones, flat screens, Jerry Garcia chia pets. Everything you submit to the free market...keeps getting better and better.
In response to criticism of its treatment of killer whales, Sea World said it will build them a larger habitat. When asked for comment, killer whales said, 'Hey, you know what's a larger habitat?' THE OCEAN.
People call me a socialist sometimes. But, no, you gotta meet real socialists. You'll have a sense of what a socialist is.
I'm a free market person, a free trader. But if we had a market in California, there would be competition.
When democratic governments create economic calamity, free markets get the blame.
Every time you cut programs, you take away a person who has a vested interest in high taxes and you put him on the tax rolls and make him a taxpayer. A farmer on subsidies is part welfare bum, whereas a free-market farmer is a small businessman with a gun.
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.
It is particularly odd that economists who profess to be champions of a free-market economy, should go to such twists and turns to avoid facing the plain fact: that gold, that scarce and valuable market-produced metal, has always been, and will continue to be, by far the best money for human society.
Gold was not selected arbitrarily by governments to be the monetary standard. Gold had developed for many centuries on the free market as the best money; as the commodity providing the most stable and desirable monetary medium.
I am a conservative Republican, a firm believer in free market capitalism. A free market system allows all parties to compete, which ensures the best and most competitive project emerges, and ensures a fair, democratic process.
Now, modern economies have a very effective mechanism for deciding if salaries are really too high: it's called the free market. That's how most people's salaries are set, after all, including those of major-league baseball players and European soccer players.
In the United States, the government is bailing out banks, intervening in the economy, yet in Latin America, the Right continues to talk about 'free markets.' It's totally outdated; they don't have arguments; they don't have any sense.
Voluntary association produces the free market - where each person can choose among a multitude of possibilities.
Time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find... The future becomes insistent.
Contrary to the claims of some of my critics and some of the editorial pages, I am an ardent believer in the free market.
Let the rabbit of free enterprise out of its velveteen bag and too many people would have to be fired, too much idiocy exposed to the light of judgment or ridicule, too much vanity sacrificed to the fires of efficiency. Such a catastrophe obviously would threaten the American way of life, to say nothing of the belief in free markets.
Racial, globalist free markets hasn't worked for everybody in America - hasn't worked for at least the white working, or lower middle class in America don't perceive that it has worked very well for them. It hasn't served everybody, and a bit of protectionism - for many American voters - seems like quite an attractive thing.
I think here is the irony of American history. We don't have an established church. When you have an established church nobody takes religion as seriously as we do here. We have a free market in religion. The religious groups are competing with each other.
Corporations are a good thing. But corporations should not be running our government... They have driven the American economy since its founding, and the prosperity of our country is largely dependent on the free operation of corporations. But some corporations don't want free markets, and they don't want democracy. They want profits.
I didn't have a perfect model, but I wanted to try to blend my own personal reflections and experiences with this broader canvas to see how a lot of the narratives we have about economy and foreign policy got stuck. Because we have these categories of liberal, conservative, free marketer, open government - all these stereotypes about our politics and the categories we try to put things in are inadequate to this sort of complex, ambiguous, sometimes contradictory experience we have as ordinary people and that I have as an elected official.
By preventing a free market in education, a handful of social engineers - backed by the industries that profit from compulsory schooling: teacher colleges, textbook publishers, materials suppliers, et al. - have ensured that most of our children will not have an education, even though they may be thoroughly schooled.
Contrary to the vision of the left, it was the free market which produced affordable housing - before government intervention made housing unaffordable.
Whatever their limitations, Freud and Marx developed complex and subtle theories of human nature grounded in their observation of individual and social behavior. The crackpot rationalism of free-market economics merely relies on an abstract model of how people "must" behave.
In the 19th century, a lot of people were against outlawing child labour, because to do so would be against the very foundations of a free market economy: 'These children want to work, these people want to employ them... what is your problem? It's not as if anyone has kidnapped them...'