Howard Baetjer Jr. > Quotes

“The crony capitalism we have seen of late in the United States, in which governments subsidize, sponsor, bail out, or otherwise protect certain businesses from the discipline of market profit and loss, is not free markets. It’s sort-of free markets, somewhat free enterprise. It’s precisely what this book condemns: it’s government intervention.”
― Howard Baetjer Jr., Free Our Markets: A Citizens' Guide to Essential Economics

“It leads good people to try to improve on the “simple system of natural liberty” using coercion that they mean to be benign. They try to improve society faster than is possible, by means that can’t work, and their efforts set society back.”
― Howard Baetjer Jr., Free Our Markets: A Citizens' Guide to Essential Economics

“At the same time, I began to question the efficacy of government for improving human lives. I came to suspect that taxation, restrictions, mandates, subsidies, licenses, tariffs, bailouts, prohibitions and all the rest, even if well-intended, usually protect monopoly, cause recession, burden the poor, enforce racial discrimination (as I learned from Jennifer Roback, the Jim Crow laws were legislation), obstruct education, and so on.”
― Howard Baetjer Jr., Free Our Markets: A Citizens' Guide to Essential Economics

“that no one may justly initiate the use of force on others, and that governmental force should be used only to secure people’s rights to life, liberty, and property.”
― Howard Baetjer Jr., Free Our Markets: A Citizens' Guide to Essential Economics

“This is the knowledge problem of central planning. It explains why comprehensive socialism must necessarily always fail: the central planners cannot get the knowledge they need in order to plan effectively.”
― Howard Baetjer Jr., Free Our Markets: A Citizens' Guide to Essential Economics