Laissezfaire Quotes
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When laissez-faire creates instability, the move to a freer market can be something less than pure gain.
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More Laissezfaire Quotes
An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense - perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire - that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other.
Alan Greenspan— Gold and Economic Freedom, by Alan Greenspan, 1966.
Though the framework is libertarian and laissez-faire,individual communities within it need not be, and perhaps no community within it will choose to be so. Thus, the characteristics of the framework need not pervade the individual communities. In this laissez-faire system it could turn out that though they are permitted, there are no actually functioning "capitalist" institutions; or that some communities have them and others don't or some communities have some of them, or what you will.
Robert Nozick— Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; The Framework as Utopian Common Ground, p. 320
[S]cientists are not robotic inducing machines that infer structures of explanation only from regularities observed in natural phenomena (assuming, as I doubt, that such a style of reasoning could ever achieve success in principle). Scientists are human beings, immersed in culture, and struggling with all the curious tools of inference that mind permits […]. Culture can potentiate as well as constrain as Darwin's translation of Adam Smith's laissez-faire economic models into biology as the theory of natural selection. In any case, objective minds do not exist outside culture, so we must make the best of our ineluctable embedding.
stephen jay gould— pp. 6–7 (Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987))
Nevertheless the theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of the production and distribution of a given output produced under conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire.
john maynard keynes— Preface to the German Edition
Thus, the weight of my criticism is directed against the inadequacy of the theoretical foundations of the laissez-faire doctrine upon which I was brought up and for many years I taught;
john maynard keynes— Book 6, Chapter 23, Section 2, p. 339
There is today hardly any country in the world outside the communist bloc which does not have a mixed economy. In fact, even countries which call themselves socialist would object to theirs not being described as a mixed economy, for it would imply that it was a totalitarian one, while countries like Germany or Japan, usually thought of as having typically free enterprise economies, would do the same; for, otherwise, it would imply that theirs was a nineteenth century laissez-faire economy.
j. r. d. tata— Address on 'Why a Mixed Economy?' to the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India, New Delhi, April 4, 1975.
When laissez-faire creates instability, the move to a freer market can be something less than pure gain.
— Chapter 2, Capital, p. 85 (The Economic Illusion (1984))
The first condition for the establishment of perpetual peace is the general adoption of the principles of laissez-faire capitalism.
ludwig von mises— Ludwig von Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science: An Essay on Method (1962), p. 137
Probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rough rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez-faire .
— Friedrich Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom (1944)
If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it private enterprise on well tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is.
john maynard keynes— Book 3, Chapter 10, Section 6, p. 129
