The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.

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Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

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The key insight of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.

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When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union - like public housing in the United States - look decrepit within a year or two of their construction.

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A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.

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Since the 1930s the technique of buying votes with the voters' own money has been expanded to an extent undreamed of by earlier politicians.

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When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.

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If capitalism worked as the socialists think an economic system ought to work, and provided a constant equality of living conditions for all, regardless of whether a man was able or not, resourceful or not, diligent or not, thrifty or not, if capitalism put no premiums on resourcefulness and effort and not penalty on idleness or vice, it would produce only an equality of destitution.

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Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.

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