“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.”

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 government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.

If you pay people not to work and tax them when they do, don’t be surprised if you get unemployment.

The word ‘free’ is used three times in the Declaration of Independence and once in the First Amendment to the Constitution, along with ‘freedom.’ The word ‘fair’ is not used in either of our founding documents.

Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men.

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

There’s no point in comparing an actual, operating system with an ideal system that doesn’t exist.

Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.

Government is a way by which every individual believes he can live at the expense of everybody else.

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

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

Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.

Anything that government can do, private enterprise can do for half the cost.

Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery.

One role of prohibition is in making the drug market more lucrative.

Fear is in almost all cases a wretched instrument of government, and ought in particular never to be employed against any order of men who have the smallest pretensions to independency.

By employing the intelligence of natural systems we can create industry, buildings, even regional plans that see nature and commerce not as mutually exclusive but mutually coexisting.

I’m just what America needs: another unemployed black man.

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.

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

If you pay people not to work and tax them when they do, don’t be surprised if you get unemployment.

Every economist knows that minimum wages either do nothing or cause inflation and unemployment. That’s not a statement, it’s a definition.

Nothing is so dangerous as that of violence employed by well-meaning people for beneficial objects.