The more the state 'plans' the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.

To give farmers money for restricting production, or to give them the same amount of money for an artificially restricted production, is no different from forcing consumers or taxpayers to pay people for doing nothing at all. In each case the beneficiaries of such policies get "purchasing power." But in each case someone else loses an exactly equivalent amount. The net loss to the community is the loss of production, because people are supported for not producing. Because there is less for everybody, because there is less to go around, real wages and real incomes must decline either through a fall in their monetary amount or through higher living costs.

Inflation is the opium of the people.

It is naively assumed that all the workers who have previously been getting less than the minimum will have their pay raised by the designated amount and will continue to be employed. The plain truth is, of course, that if no one is to be employed in industry at less than $11 to $15 a week, then no one who is not deemed worth that amount will be employed in industry at all.

HAZLITT, HENRY, The Fallacies of the NRA, American Mercury, December 1933, V.30.120, pp. 415-23

Economic laws...cannot be repealed by official fiat. It is precisely upon this rock of human behavior that the most perfect academic hopes and panaceas are wrecked.

There is never a shortage of jobs for workers to do. Rather, government employment policies that interfere with the market, minimum wage hikes, and regulations hamper the ability of entrepreneurs to employ willing laborers.

[F]reedom to trade is first and foremost a policy that places individual freedom ahead of power exercised by government to aid specific interest groups at the expense of others.

Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.

There is no means of raising wage rates for all those eager to earn wages above the height determined by the productivity of each kind of labor...the most disastrous effect of minimum wage rates, mass unemployment.

The labor unions aim at a monopolistic position on the labor market. But once they have attained it, their policies are restrictive and not monopoly price policies. They are intent upon restricting the supply of labor in their field without bothering about the fate of those excluded. They have succeeded in every comparatively underpopulated country in erecting immigration barriers. Thus they preserve their comparatively high wage rates. The excluded foreign workers are forced to stay in their countries in which the marginal productivity of labor, and consequently wage rates, are lower. The tendency toward an equalization of wage rates which prevails under free mobility of labor from country to country is paralyzed. On the domestic market the unions do not tolerate the competition of nonunionized workers and admit only a restricted number to union membership. Those not admitted must go into less remunerative jobs or must remain unemployed. The unions are not interested in the fate of these people.

[E]conomic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics.

[L]et the government decree "support prices," that is guaranteed prices over and beyond what a free market computer would signal, and entrepreneurs will produce more than the market will take.

[L]et the government decree that the ceiling price on mink coasts shall not exceed $25 and immediately there will be a shortage of perhaps 50,000,000 mink coasts. Why? Because no one wants to sell them for such a price and because there are that many women who have $25 and desire a mink coat!

Minimum wage laws tragically generate unemployment, especially among the poorest and least skilled or educated workers... Because a minimum wage, of course, does not guarantee any worker's employment; it only prohibits, by force of law, anyone from being hired at the wage which would pay his employer to hire him.

Maximum price controls simply create grave shortages and "black markets" of the commodity. The inevitable response...is more vigorous penalties[.]

[A]s always happens under price control, hidden price increases were achieved by lowering the quality of goods[.]

[P]rice controls bring shortages, and shortages bring the naked exercise of government power[.]

There are certain things, Sir, which absolute power cannot do.