A Quote by Leonard Read

It [the free market] is an organizational way of doing things, featuring openness, which enables millions of people to cooperate and compete without demanding a preliminary clearance of pedigree, nationality, color, race, religion, or wealth. It demands only that each person abide by voluntary principles, that is, by fair play. The free market means willing exchange; it is impersonal justice in the economic sphere and excludes coercion, plunder, theft, protectionism, and other anti-free market ways by which goods and services change hands.

Leonard Read

Quote Topics

Abide Anti Change Clearance Coercion Color Compete Cooperate Demanding Demands Doing Each Economic Enables Exchange Fair Fair Play Free Free Market Goods Goods And Services Hands Impersonal Justice Market Means Millions Millions Of People Nationality Only Openness Organizational Other Pedigree People Person Play Plunder Preliminary Principles Protectionism Race Religion Services Sphere Theft Things Voluntary Way Ways Wealth Which Willing Without

Quote Author

Leonard Read
September 26, 1898 - May 14, 1983

I have read a great deal of economic theory for over 50 years now, but have found only one economic "law" to which I can find NO exceptions: Where the State prevents a free market, by banning any form of goods or services, consumer demand will create a black market for those goods or services, at vastly higher prices. Can YOU think of a single exception to this law?

Robert Anton Wilson

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.

Sarah Palin

Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at.

Murray Rothbard

My father always said 'There's no free lunch.' My father was right. There's no free lunch and there's no free market. The market is rigged, the market is always rigged, and the rigging is in favour of the people who run the market. That's what the market is. It's a bent casino. The house always wins.

David Hare

The great virtue of a free market is that it enables people who hate each other, or who are from vastly different religious or ethnic backgrounds, to cooperate economically. Government intervention can't do that.

Milton Friedman

The free market doesn't exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them.

Ha-Joon Chang

A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a "permission culture" -- a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.

Lawrence Lessig

It is not true at all that a free market will ensure a democracy. It doesn't. There must be a balance between a free market and some regulations which are essential in order to safeguard the interests of consumers and of people in general.

Mahathir Mohamad

I had to abandon free market principles in order to save the free market system.

George W. Bush

We must continue to liberalise the single market, cut red tape and basically create a digital single market. We have not completed the single market yet, there is not sufficient free movement of goods, labour, services and money. We have to keep on working at that against all the protectionist tendencies that we have right now.

Alexander Stubb

The essence and the glory of the free market is that individual firms and businesses, competing on the market, provide an ever-changing orchestration of efficient and progressive goods and services: continually improving products and markets, advancing technology, cutting costs, and meeting changing consumer demands as swiftly and as efficiently as possible.

Murray Rothbard

This is the marketplace of political ideas. This is how America operates. It's a free market. It's free-wheeling. From the outside, it looks unpredictable. There's a circus-like free market.

Jon Huntsman, Jr.

There's not a single country that actually approaches economics in a pure, free market, capitalist way. I like the free market - but it very much exists only in textbooks. If I had a choice, and we could live in a very pure world, I would be a supporter of the free markets.

Dambisa Moyo

If business is going to continue to sell through the decades, it must also promote an understanding of what made those products possible, what is necessary to a free market, and what our free market means to the individual liberty of each of us, to be certain that the freedoms under which this nation was born and brought to this point shall endure in the future ... for America is the product of our freedoms.

Edward Francis Hutton

Free access to the single market will be granted to a country which accepts the four fundamental freedoms of movement of people, goods, services, and capital.