Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Spending by government currently amounts to about 45 percent of national income. By that test, government owns 45 percent of the means of production that produce the national income. The U.S. is now 45 percent socialist."

~ Milton Friedman  

"In 1983 $21 billion was spent in agricultural subsidies
-- almost equal to the net income of all American farmers."

~ Patrick Detches  

"It would take little more than $50 billion to raise every poor person above the official poverty line, yet the percentage of the population classified as poor hardly budges, while annual welfare spending amounts to four times that much. Where's the money going?"

~ Robert Higgs  

"He that goes a borrowing goes a sorrowing."

~ Benjamin Franklin  

"No one spends someone else's money as carefully as he spends his own."

~ Mark Skousen  

"A depression is a large-scale decline in production and trade... there is nothing in the nature of a free-market economy to cause such an event."

~ Nathaniel Branden  

"Today government touches everything in America and harms almost everything it touches. Federal, state, and local governments together spend 42 out of every 100 dollars we earn. Those who do the taxing and spending have long since ceased to work for the people as a whole. Rather, they work for themselves and for their clients—the education industry, the welfare culture, public-employee unions, etc.."

~ Malcolm Wallop  

"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand."

~ Milton Friedman  

"I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple. Were we directed from Washington when to sow, when to reap, we should soon want bread."

~ Thomas Jefferson  

"Why be thrifty when your old age and health care are provided for, no matter how profligate you act in your youth? Why be prudent when the state insures your bank deposits, replaces your flooded-out house, buys all the wheat you can grow? ... Why be diligent when half of your earnings are taken from you and given to the idle?"

~ David Frum  

"Welfarism and excessive spending and deficits and socialism divide us, because everybody has to go to Washington. Those who have the biggest clout, those who are the best lobbyists, those who go and they grab. And whether it's the medical industrial complex, or the banking industry, or the military industrial complex, that's who ends up controlling our government... For so long, conservatives and constitutionalists have lost the argument, they lost the moral high ground. Because those who want to give things away, not talking about where they steal it from, but they want to give things and take care of people, they get the moral high ground and they come by as being compassionate. And we who believe in liberty, we lack compassion. But the truth is, there's only one compassionate system known to man, and that is freedom and personal responsibility, then there's enough wealth, and then we will all have personal responsibility to use this compassion that we have, first to take care of our families and friends and neighbors, and there would be so much wealth that we could spread this wealth around the world."

~ Dr. Ron Paul  

"The best way to put more money in people's wallets is to leave it there in the first place."

~ Edwin Feulner  

"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."

~ Murray N. Rothbard  

"Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses."

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson  

"Money is the sign of liberty. To curse money is to curse liberty -- to curse life, which is nothing, if it be not free."

~ Remy de Gourmont