Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.

Only people have incomes and they derive them through the market from the resources they own, whether these be in the form of corporate stock, or of bonds, or of land, or of their personal capacity.

The role of government just considered is to do something that the market cannot do for itself, namely, to determine, arbitrate, and enforce the rules of the game.

The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.

Believers in aristocracy and socialism share a faith in centralized rule, in rule by command rather than by voluntary cooperation.

Inflation is taxation without representation.

Deserves is an impossible thing to decide. No one deserves anything. Thank God we don’t get what we deserve.

The smaller the unit of government and the more restricted the functions assigned government, the less likely it is that its actions will reflect special interests rather than the general interest.

There is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.

Anybody who was easily converted was not worth converting.

I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it’s only the waste that prevents the harm from being greater.

With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.

With respect to teachers’ salaries …. Poor teachers are grossly overpaid and good teachers grossly underpaid. Salary schedules tend to be uniform and determined far more by seniority.

The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn’t do a thing for the people who are unemployed. Because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn’t do a thing for them.

There is no place for government to prohibit consumers from buying products the effect of which will be to harm themselves.

I am a libertarian with a small ‘l’ and a Republican with a capital ‘R’. And I am a Republican with a capital ‘R’ on grounds of expediency, not on principle.

Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest? . . . And just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us.

I think that the Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government.

I’m in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

He moves fastest who moves alone.

Education spending will be most effective if it relies on parental choice & private initiative — the building blocks of success throughout our society.

Society doesn’t have values. People have values.

The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.

See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That’s literally true.

Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.

The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both,

Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Governments never learn. Only people learn.

I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.

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

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.

A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.