There's No Free Lunch Quotes

“It is not true that Congress spends money like a drunken sailor. Drunken sailors spend their own money. Congress spends our money.” - Dr. Art Laffer”
― David L. Bahnsen, There’s No Free Lunch: 250 Economic Truths

“It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.” - F.A. Hayek You may want to read this one several times to let it sink in. In a free society, the collective knowledge of all the individuals in it is at use—it is not suppressed, it has distributive powers, and its applications are monumental and miraculous. The conscious decision to replace the power of that collective knowledge expressed in a free and open marketplace with the limited, broken, misapplied, and misaligned knowledge of a central planner is one of the great mysteries of modern times, and one of its great iniquities. “The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.” - Thomas Sowell This is, indeed, the question. Defenders of free enterprise do not believe in a perfect administration under a market economy. Rather, we do not believe in the possibility of such. To the extent imperfect decision-making is accepted, we then seek to solve for who has the best chance of answering the question correctly, he with local knowledge or he without? He who will reap the consequences of his decision, or he who will not? Better decisions that are imperfect are superior to worse ones that are also imperfect. And accountability where a decision is made is better than no accountability where a decision is also made. One simply must abandon belief in the omnipotent disinterested third party (which no one explicitly believes in but too many implicitly do). Once we have accepted the inevitability of imperfect decision-making, choosing who decides is the easy part.”
― David L. Bahnsen, There’s No Free Lunch: 250 Economic Truths

“It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.” - F.A. Hayek You may want to read this one several times to let it sink in. In a free society, the collective knowledge of all the individuals in it is at use—it is not suppressed, it has distributive powers, and its applications are monumental and miraculous. The conscious decision to replace the power of that collective knowledge expressed in a free and open marketplace with the limited, broken, misapplied, and misaligned knowledge of a central planner is one of the great mysteries of modern times, and one of its great iniquities.”
― David L. Bahnsen, There’s No Free Lunch: 250 Economic Truths

“We can never at one and the same time question all [traditional] values. Such absolute doubt could lead only to the destruction of our civilization and—in view of the numbers to which economic progress has allowed the human race to grow—to extreme misery and starvation. Complete abandonment of all traditional values is, of course, impossible; it would make man incapable of acting.” - F.A. Hayek Human action flows out of value systems. Those who hold traditional values in disdain have every right to put the burden of legitimacy on those who hold to them. But human action throughout history has led to greater growth and less misery. Those who would dismiss the traditions and values that have accompanied human action throughout civilization carry a burden themselves—accounting for what value system will replace that which we dismiss without wreaking havoc on civilization. It’s a tall order.”
― David L. Bahnsen, There’s No Free Lunch: 250 Economic Truths