If we have system in which government is in a position to give large favor - it's human nature to try to get this favor - whether those people are large enterprises, or whether they're small businesses like farmers, or whether they're representatives of any other special group. The only way to prevent that is to force them to engage in competition one with the other.

There's only one thing that all of the central banks control and that is the base, their own liability, and they can control that in various ways. They can control it directly by open market operations, buying and selling government securities or other assets, for example, buying and selling gold, or they can control it indirectly by altering the rate at which banks lend to one another.

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.

There's a smokestack on the back of every government program.

Socialism, in the traditional sense, meant government ownership and operation of the means of production. Outside of North Korea and a couple of other spots, no one in the world today would define socialism that way. That will never come back.

People hired by government know who is their benefactor. People who lose their jobs or fail to get them because of the government program do not know that that is the source of their problem. The good effects are visible. The bad effects are invisible. The good effects generate votes. The bad effects generate discontent, which is as likely to be directed at private business as at the government.

I am a limited-government libertarian.

If, for example, existing government intervention is minor, we shall attach a smaller weight to the negative effect of additional government intervention. This is an important reason why many earlier liberals, like Henry Simons, writing at a time when government was small by today's standards, were willing to have government undertake activities that today's liberals would not accept now that government has become so overgrown.

The present oil crisis has not been produced by the oil companies. It is a result of government mismanagement exacerbated by the Mideast war.

[T]he burden of government is not measured by how much it taxes, but by how much it spends.

What does it mean to say that government might have a responsibility? Government can't have a responsibility any more than the business can. The only entities which can have responsibilities are people.

How do you hold down government spending?

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

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

Government spends somebody else's money on somebody else.

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

Economists may not know much. But we know one thing very well: how to produce surpluses and shortages. Do you want a surplus? Have the government legislate a minimum price that is above the price that would otherwise prevail. That is what we have done at one time or another to produce surpluses of wheat, of sugar, of butter, of many other commodities. Do you want a shortage? Have the government legislate a maximum price that is below the price that would otherwise prevail.

There is likely to be a lag between the need for action and government ["an individual's" or "a team's"] recognition of the need; a further lag between recognition of the need for action and the taking of action; and a still further lag between the action and its effects

They think that the cure to big government is to have bigger government... the only effective cure is to reduce the scope of government - get government out of the business.

The countries that have risen and separated out as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union are, on the whole, following freer economic policies. Most of these states have freer government and less restrictions on trade.

The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus.

Spending by government currently amounts to about 45 percent of national income. By that test, government owns 45 percent of the means of production that produce the national income. The U.S. is now 45 percent socialist.

It is a mark of how far we have gone on the road to serfdom that government allocation and rationing of oil is the automatic response to the oil crisis.

I think almost every economist would agree that government gets itself in trouble when it tries to interfere with voluntary behavior.