Politics and Power

I am sometimes a fox and sometimes a lion. The whole secret of government lies in knowing when to be the one or the other.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

The government is us; we are the government, you and I.

Only a government that is rich and safe can afford to be a democracy, for democracy is the most expensive and nefarious kind of government ever heard of on earth.

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.

The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.

The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.

It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.

All government is an ugly necessity.

Government is the people's business and every man, woman and child becomes a shareholder with the first penny of tax paid.

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

Why is it inflationary if the people keep their own money, and spend it the way they want to, [but] not inflationary if the government takes it and spends it the way it wants to?

Government always finds a need for whatever money it gets.

What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.

The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward.

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the wickedest of men will do the wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.

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

It is because it’s prohibited. 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.

A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it … gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.

In war, you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times.