Contemplating this great city of Paris...Here are a million of human beings who would die in a few days, if provisions of every kind did not flow in towards this vast metropolis...How can each day bring just what is necessary, nothing less, nothing more, to this gigantic market... This power is an ABSOLUTE PRINCIPLE, the principle of freedom in exchanges...What would be your condition, inhabitants of Paris, if a minister, however superior his abilities, should undertake to substitute...his own genius?

A little government involvement is just as dangerous as a lot - because the first leads inevitably to the second.

[I]t is in the market where citizens can properly exercise their discretion over property use and that once government is given discretion in this regard, it has the arbitrary power to decree one citizen’s aims more worthy than another’s.

If you enter my house and begin to negotiate with me about what I may watch on TV, the issue at hand is not how reasonably you do so. You have intruded in my private sphere and are unwelcome, however reasonable your requests may seem to you or others.

More law, less justice.

Anyone who has been a business traveler since the late 1970’s, for example, has seen firsthand how deregulation has democratized air travel. Low fares and mass marketing have brought such luxuries as foreign travel, weekend getaways to remote locales, and reunions of far-flung families – just twenty years ago, pursuits of the wealthy – to people of relatively modest means.

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.

The government is a worthy defense against force and fraud, but the market is much better at protecting against monopoly, inflation, soaring prices, depressed wages, and the problems of scarcity.

In 1993, U.S. Senator Tom Harkin reintroduced legislation to prohibit the importation of goods made with child labor. Garment factories in Bangladesh, fearful of losing out on the U.S. market, responded by firing 50,000 children. While the firing freed the children from laboring under sweatshop conditions, it did not restore their childhoods nor secure their futures. It did not put food on their tables. It did not make education available to them. The United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) and other organizations visited Bangladesh to see the results of the mass firings. UNICEF found the unemployed children taking new jobs as stone-crushers, street hustlers, and prostitutes -- all of which were far more dangerous than their sweatshop jobs in the garment industry.

In the general course of human nature, a power over a man's subsistence amounts to a power over his will.

It never pays a bureaucrat to actually do anything. Then he has something to lose. Let’s protect ourselves some more, is their attitude.

[B]ureaucracy, once given powers to invade Liberty, proceeds to fatten and enlarge its activities, and...departures from practical human nature and economic experience soon find themselves so entangled as to force more and more violent steps.

[U]nder coercive co-operation by government, the final determination of method for the joint action is made not by men of large experience in practical affairs, but by government agents - often by men wholly lacking in both vision and ability. The bureaucrat is above accountability so long as his political support holds.

No one with a day’s experience in government fails to realize that in all bureaucracies there are three implacable spirits - self-perpetuation, expansion, and an incessant demand for more power...They drive always to extension of powers by interpretation of authority, and by more and more legislation. Power is the father of impatience with human faults, and impatience breeds arrogance. In their mass action, they become the veritable exponents of political tyranny.

[I]n a democracy every member of the Congress, every newspaper, is a potential critic, and the accumulative effect upon government agents is to destroy willingness to take that responsibility, risk, and adventure which economic activities require every moment of the day...The inevitable result is to deaden even any initiative, enterprise, efficiency of bureaucracy that might exist.

Bureaucracy’s instinctive defense to criticism is to color the information and news with its objectives rather than presenting a cold analysis of results. It goes further in resentment to criticism and attempts to meet it with denunciation. We witness this vituperative impatience from those who believe they are serving the common good. Critics are smeared by personal attack upon character or motives, not answered by sober argument.

In all regulation we have [a] practical problem - that is, in building walls against oppression, that we do not, in seeking to save all the foolish and to prevent all the possible permutations of sin, damage the contributions to progress by thousands of honest men.

Men chosen by election for oratorical triumphs or selected by bureaucracy will on average be no more honest, far less competent, and much more oppressive to Liberty than merchants, bankers, and industrialists operating under the Law.

The bureaucracy takes itself to be the ultimate purpose of the state.

For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.

As you increase the cost of the license to practice medicine, you increase the price at which the medical service must be sold and you correspondingly decrease the number of people who can afford to buy the service.

Individuals and small groups tend to regulate much more strictly and efficiently than large groups and governments do. As a matter of course, a given industry's self-imposed standards tend to be set a bit higher than those imposed by the State. As a result, the government insures a minimum set of legal standards much lower than those that are or would be set by the profession itself.

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, you can't take part. And you've got to put your body upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.

I ask opponents of biotechnology, do you want 2 to 3 million children a year to go blind and 1 million to die of vitamin A deficiency, just because you object to the way golden rice was created?

[Government] covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence.

If even one new drug of the stature of penicillin or digitalis has been unjustifiably banished to a company's back shelf because of exceedingly stringent regulatory requirements, that event will have harmed more people than all the toxicity that has occurred in the history of modern drug development.