Which countries contain the most peaceful, the most moral, and the happiest people? Those people are found in the countries where the law least interferes with private affairs; where government is least felt; where the individual has the greatest scope, and free opinion the greatest influence; where administrative powers are fewest and simplest; where taxes are lightest and most nearly equal, and popular discontent the least excited and the least justifiable; where individuals and groups most actively assume their responsibilities, and consequently, where the morals of admittedly imperfect human beings are constantly improving; where trade, assemblies, and associations are the least restricted; where labor, capital and populations suffer the fewest forced displacements...

The solution to the problems of human relationships is to be found in liberty.

How can we know what threats society's resources should be used to combat and what issues should be addressed...It is the market, not the state, that provides mechanisms (risk premiums, prices, profit and loss) to check ideological extremes.

CARDEN, ART, A Hoax to Raise Our Consciousness

[P]rogress in agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and other key sectors of economic production has made the material necessities of life –– food, shelter, and clothing –– available to essentially everyone. To be sure, many people, including the seriously handicapped and the mentally incompetent, remain dependent on the public purse for their necessities. And many people continue to live in terrible squalor. But the problem of poverty, defined as material scarcity, has been solved...This was not so 50 years ago, or ever before.

[T]he critical source of social wealth has shifted over the last few hundred years from land (at the end of the 18th century) to physical capital (at the end of the 19th) to, today, human capital –– education and cognitive ability. This development is not an unmixed gain from the standpoint of economic equality. The ability to acquire and deploy human capital is a function of intelligence, and intelligence is not only unequally distributed but also, to a significant degree, heritable. As Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Herrnstein argue in The Bell Curve, an economy that rewards sheer brainpower replaces one old source of inequality, socioeconomic advantage, with a new one, cognitive advantage. But an economy that rewards human capital also tears down far more artificial barriers than it erects. For most people who inhabit the vast middle range of the bell curve, intelligence is much more equally distributed than land or physical capital ever was.

[T]he material benefits of the knowledge-based economy are by no means limited to...the cognitive elite. Many of the newest industries, from fast food to finance to communications, have succeeded in part by opening up employment opportunities for those of modest ability and training – occupations much less arduous and physically much less risky than those they have replaced.

[I]n the wealthy Western democracies, material needs and desires have been so thoroughly fulfilled for so many people that, for the first time in history, we are seeing large-scale voluntary reductions in the amount of time spent at paid employment. This development manifests itself in different forms: longer periods of education and training for the young; earlier retirement despite longer life spans; and, in between, many more hours devoted to leisure, recreation, entertainment, family, community and religious activities, charitable and other nonremunerative pursuits, and so forth.

[I]n very wealthy societies, income has become a less useful gauge of economic welfare and hence of economic equality. When income becomes to some degree discretionary, and when many peoples’ incomes change from year to year for reasons unrelated to their life circumstances, consumption becomes a better measure of material welfare. And by this measure, welfare appears much more evenly distributed: people of higher income spend progressively smaller shares on consumption, while in the bottom ranges, annual consumption often exceeds income. (In fact, government statistics suggest that in the bottom 20 percent of the income scale, average annual consumption is about twice annual income – probably a reflection of a substantial underreporting of earnings in this group.) According to the economist Daniel Slesnick, the distribution of consumption, unlike the distribution of reported income, has become measurably more equal in recent decades.

[A] society that empowers individuals to be self-governing guarantees that some of the, some of the time, will be disappointed and experience failure. Nevertheless, because people learn from experience, so long as the feedback is accurate and timely, the self-organizing characteristics of the overall process maximizes the likelihood that the largest number of plans will succeed over time.

DIZERGA, GUS, Persuasion, Power and Polity, A Theory of Democratic Self-Organization, Chapter Five

It is not society, however ill organized, that has caused, or today causes, poverty. That is the primitive condition of the human race. It is only through some social organization ensuring to man freedom for his labor and security for his savings that he can escape poverty.

EMERY, LUCILIUS A., Concerning Justice, Chapter III, The Problem of Rights Continued

Allow men as much freedom of thought and action as can be exercised without interference with like freedom of others, but restrain them from exercising any greater freedom, and they can and will live together in society though they may be wholly selfish in feeling and conduct. What is called the golden rule, that we should do to others as we would have them do to us, is a precept of philanthropy, of charity, not of justice. The rule enunciated by Confucius five hundred years before Christ, the rule that we should not do to others what we would not have them do to us, is sufficient for the existence of society.

EMERY, LUCILIUS A., Concerning Justice, Chapter IV, Justice the Equilibrium

There must...be left to the individual some personal motives for labor and thrift, for, after all, it is the toil of individuals that supports society and its members.

EMERY, LUCILIUS A., Concerning Justice, Chapter III, The Problem of Rights Continued

The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.

East and West Germany almost provide a controlled scientific experiment...In the Middle East, Israel and Egypt offer the same contrast as West and East Germany. In the Far East, Malaya, Singapore, Thailand, Formosa, Hong Kong, and Japan-all relying primarily on free markets-are thriving and their people full of hope; a far call from India, Indonesia, and Communist China-all relying heavily on central planning. Against it is in Communist China and not Hong Kong that has to guard its borders against people trying to get out.

[C]oordination of men’s activities through central direction and through voluntary cooperation are roads going in very different directions; the first to serfdom, the second to freedom...central discretion is also a road to poverty for the ordinary man; voluntary cooperation, a road to plenty.

To fit into the Golden Straitjacket a country must either adopt, or be seen as moving toward, the following golden rules: making the private sector the primary engine of its economic growth, maintaining a low rate of inflation and price stability, shrinking the size of its state bureaucracy, maintaining as close to a balanced budget as possible, if not a surplus, eliminating or lowering tariffs on imported goods, removing restrictions on foreign investment, getting rid of quotas and domestic monopolies, increasing exports, privatizing state-owned industries and utilities, deregulating capital markets, making its currency convertible, opening its industries, stock, and bond markets to direct foreign ownership and investment, deregulating its economy to promote as much domestic competition as possible, eliminating government corruption, subsidies and kickbacks as much as possible, opening its banking and telecommunications systems to private ownership and competition, and allowing its citizens to choose from an array of competing pension options and foreign-run pension and mutual funds. . . . As your country puts on the Golden Straitjacket, two things tend to happen: your economy grows and your politics shrinks.

Let the market work, and the ambition of each individual will serve the common good of society.

No country with a persistently high economic freedom rating during the two decades failed to achieve a high level of income. In contrast, no country with a persistently low rating was able to achieve even middle income status. . . . The countries with the largest increases in economic freedom during the period achieved impressive growth rates.

Men are… not likely to give their best for long periods unless their own interests are directly involved.

[I]t is the consumer that wins through the production of the plenty of goods and services. For he is the beneficiary of that increasing production at the constantly lower costs which we require to reach our social objective - in constantly increasing standards of living.

And say, finally, whether peace is best preserved by giving energy to the government, or information to the people. This last is the most certain, and the most legitimate engine of government...Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve it.

[L]iberty... is the great parent of science and of virtue; and a nation will be great in both in proportion as it is free.

Poverty and suffering are not due to the unequal distribution of goods and resources, but to the unequal distribution of capitalism.

Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.

MILL, JOHN STUART, On Liberty, Chapter 1

It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating it and calling it forth, within the limits imposed by the rights and interests of others, that human beings become a noble and beautiful object of contemplation.

MILL, JOHN STUART, On Liberty, Chapter 3

[I]t is now recognized...that both the cheapness and the good quality of commodities are most effectually provided for by leaving the producers and sellers perfectly free, under the sole check of equal freedom to the buyers for supplying themselves everywhere.

MILL, JOHN STUART, On Liberty, Chapter 5

Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer.

The card player wins money by outsmarting his antagonist. The businessman makes money by supplying customers with goods they want to acquire...He who interprets the conduct of business as trickery is on the wrong path.

He who disdains the fall in infant mortality and the gradual disappearance of famines and plagues may cast the first stone upon the materialism of economists.

That people in free countries have life expectancies almost two decades longer than for those without freedom (76 years vs. 57 years) stunningly validates the thesis that freedom creates greater wealth and greater health...Advocates of liberty can take great comfort in this documented evidence that more freedom means longer and richer lives. It refutes a seductive argument; namely, that certain restrictions might produce a better economic and social result.

Business and industry - trade and manufacture - are inherent in civilization. Every human society, no matter how wholesomely primitive, practices as much trade and manufacture as it can figure out. For good reason. It is the fruits of trade and manufacture that raise us from the wearying much of subsistence and give us the health, wealth, education, leisure and warm, dry rooms with Xerox machines that allow us to be the ecology-conscious, selfless, committed, splendid individuals that we are.

O’ROURKE, P.J., Parliament of Whores

Americans live, on average, three decades longer today than in 1900. For every infant death today, there were ten a century ago. Wages in real dollars have nearly quintupled, from $3.45 an hour to $12.50, while the real per capita gross domestic product has zoomed from $4,800 to $31,500. And no, the poor have not been left behind. These increases were made possible in part by the last century's economic liberation of American women and minorities. Nearly three-quarters of Americans have a television with cable and a VCR, air conditioning in their homes, a microwave oven, and at least one automobile. And we have twice as much leisure time as we did in 1900.

If you want a contemporary demonstration...of a free economy and of a controlled economy...take a look at the condition of West Germany and of East Germany.

[T]he historical, political, and economic case for capitalism has never been refuted - and that the only way the statists can hope to win is by never allowing it to be discussed.

Observe the paradoxes built up about capitalism. It has been called a system of selfishness...yet is it the only system that drew men to unite on a large scale into great countries, and peacefully cooperate across national boundaries, while all the collectivist, internationalist, One-World systems are splitting the world into Balkanized tribes. Capitalism has been called a system of greed - yet it is the system that raised the standard of living of its poorest citizens to heights no collectivist system has ever begun to equal. Capitalism has been called nationalistic - yet it is the only system that banished ethnicity, and made it possible, in the United States, for men of various, formerly antagonistic nationalities to live together in peace.

The market...is the only means there is for the automatic and speedy allocation of scarce resources; that is, it is the method for bringing a scarce and high-priced good or service within the reach of those whose incomes are lowest. It is the miracle worker, demonstrated daily, over and over again, before our eyes.

[I]f material wealth has any moral purpose at all, it is to free man from the restrictions which are imposed by a subsistence level of living; for when one has to labor in the rice paddies from sunrise to sunset merely to eke out an animal existence, he doesn’t stand much chance of evolving and developing those numerous potentialities peculiar to his own person...Material wealth is but a tool to help us develop our God-given faculties of intellect and spirit.

There are no such things as limits to growth, because there are no limits on the human capacity for intelligence, imagination and wonder.

We who live in free market societies believe that growth, prosperity and ultimately human fulfillment, are created from the bottom up, not the government down. Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefitting from their success -- only then can societies remain economically alive, dynamic, progressive, and free. Trust the people. This is the one irrefutable lesson of the entire postwar period contradicting the notion that rigid government controls are essential to economic development.

The free market cannot produce the perfect world, but it can create an environment in which each imperfect man may conduct his lifelong search for purpose in his own way, in which each day may order his life according to his own imperfect vision of his destiny suffering both the agonies of his errors and the sweet pleasure of his successes. this freedom is what it means to be a man; this is the God-head, if you wish.

I see the liberty of the individual not only as a great moral good in itself...but also as the necessary condition for the flowering of all the other goods that mankind cherishes: moral virtue, civilization, the arts and sciences, economic prosperity.

In 1690 Governor Fletcher of New York admitted that "the town of Philadelphia in fourteen years’ time has become nearly equal to the city of New York in trade and riches" - an unwitting tribute to the propulsive powers of individual freedom, unencumbered by taxes and restrictions, as over against the crippling effects of monopoly and high taxation on the older colony.

The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.

The Labour Party believes in turning workers against owners; we believe in turning workers into owners.

Indeed liberty is the divine source of all human happiness. To possess, in security, the effects of our industry, is the most powerful and reasonable incitement to be industrious: And to be able to provide for our children, and to leave them all that we have, is the best motive to beget them. But where property is precarious, labour will languish. The privileges of thinking, saying, and doing what we please, and of growing as rich as we can, without any other restriction, than that by all this we hurt not the public, nor one another, are the glorious privileges of liberty: and its effects, to live in freedom, plenty, and safety.

It may be argued, and it frequently is, that free competition is a ruthless and cruel process. But it is not nearly so ruthless and cruel as the opposite philosophy, which down through the ages has kept the majority of people ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-clothed, embroiled in wars, and dying of famine and pestilence.