The Economics of Freedom Quotes

“There is one path out of poverty, and that is the path of wealth creation through the free market.”
― Frédéric Bastiat, The Economics of Freedom: What Your Professors Won't Tell You

“For when a farmer borrows fifty francs to buy a plow, it is not actually the fifty francs that is lent to him; it is the plow.
And when a merchant borrows twenty thousand francs to buy a house, it is not the twenty thousand francs he owes; it is the house.”
― Frédéric Bastiat, The Economics of Freedom: What Your Professors Won't Tell You

“There are people who think that plunder loses all its immorality as soon as it becomes legal.”
― Frédéric Bastiat, The Economics of Freedom: What Your Professors Won't Tell You

“What is a law? he asked himself. It is a measure to which, when once promulgated, whether it is good or bad, everyone has to conform.”
― Frédéric Bastiat, The Economics of Freedom: What Your Professors Won't Tell You

“Bastiat was a nineteenth century French political economist who dedicated the last years of his short life to proving that government by its nature possesses neither the moral authority to intervene in our freedom nor the practical ability to create prosperity through its intervention.”
― Frédéric Bastiat, The Economics of Freedom: What Your Professors Won't Tell You

“What needs explanation is not poverty, which is the natural state of mankind, but wealth.”
― Frédéric Bastiat, The Economics of Freedom: What Your Professors Won't Tell You

“Chateaubriand said of history: There are two consequences in history: one immediate and instantaneously recognized; the other distant and unperceived at first. These consequences often contradict each other; the former come from our short-run wisdom, the latter from long-run wisdom.”
― Frédéric Bastiat, The Economics of Freedom: What Your Professors Won't Tell You

“The academy is, perhaps unsurprisingly, full of people who think that they are smart enough to run the lives of others. They are not. Hence the subtitle of this volume: “What Your Professors Won’t Tell You.”
― Frédéric Bastiat, The Economics of Freedom: What Your Professors Won't Tell You

“But when James Goodfellow hands over a hundred sous to a government official to receive no service for it or even to be subjected to inconveniences, it is as if he were to give his money to a thief. It”
― Frédéric Bastiat, The Economics of Freedom: What Your Professors Won't Tell You