Sheldon Richman Quotes

“Freedom is never more in peril than when politicians feel the pressure to 'do something.'”

— Sheldon Richman

“Americans live under the delusion that enterprise here is both private and free. It may be nominally private, but it's anything but free. Unfortunately, most people don't know what freedom is. So they are unfazed when they hear that before you can do anything of a commercial nature, you need government permission.”

— Sheldon Richman

“Some conservatives are surprised to find people on the Left supporting the war in Afghanistan. It's not surprising at all ... It is hard for the government to prosecute a war and not expand ... Conservatives may think they can support war and oppose the expansion of the state, but that is like trying to square the circle. What makes them think they can contain the expansion?”

— Sheldon Richman

“Today, the people who would use guns to violate rights have little trouble getting them, while those who would use them to defend their rights have increasing trouble getting them ... Gun control is in effect a subsidy for criminals.”

— Sheldon Richman

“Wealth comes from the production and exchange of goods and services. If someone efficiently produces a good that many people willingly trade their money for, he becomes wealthy.”

— Sheldon Richman

“The government's coercive taxing power necessarily creates two classes: those who create and those who consume the wealth expropriated and transferred by that power.”

— Sheldon Richman

“Anyone who believes in the natural and inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is obliged to accept that individuals have the right to buy and sell alcohol. That's why all the regulations that people take for granted-the restrictions on hours of operation, the ban on Sunday sales, the minimum distance from schools and churches, the minimum age, and the protection of local wineries from competition by wineries in other states-are illegitimate.”

— Sheldon Richman

“The state is an organization of mere mortals who, by one dubious method or another, have been allowed to don the mantle of political legitimacy and to command obedience on pain of imprisonment even of those who never consented to the preposterous arrangement.”

— Sheldon Richman

“No matter how much the government controls the economic system, any problem will be blamed on whatever small zone of freedom that remains.”

— Sheldon Richman

“The truly free market is the worker's best friend.”

— Sheldon Richman

“The more power government has to provide things, the more power it has to dictate terms.”

— Sheldon Richman

“People with an investment in government power will torture logic like a medieval inquisitor rather than face the facts ... There's a simple way to keep money out of politics: Keep politics out of our money.”

— Sheldon Richman

“Government interference with the economic process represents a substitution of political for consumer objectives.”

— Sheldon Richman

“We think of prices as simply the notation of how much we must pay for things. But the price system accomplishes far more than that. Hundreds of millions of people buying and selling, and abstaining from buying and selling, generate a system of signals - prices to producers and consumers about relative scarcities and demand. Through this system, consumers can convey to producers their subjective priorities and entrepreneurs can invest accordingly.”

— Sheldon Richman

“It should go without saying that even the most narrowly construed eminent-domain power would violate individual rights. Either a person owns his legitimately acquired property or he does not.”

— Sheldon Richman

The housing and financial crisis could not have occurred in the absence of government housing and monetary policies.

— Sheldon Richman

“In an unmolested market economy - one where all dealings are consensual - the 'allocation' of wealth and income is the result of transactions.”

— Sheldon Richman

“When government 'creates jobs' by taking money from the private sector and 'investing' in favored projects, it is not truly productive activity. Rather, the government has preempted the economic process, forbidding it to serve consumers so that it can instead serve the objectives of politicians and bureaucrats.”

— Sheldon Richman

“The alternative to the market process is government control, and we know where that principle leads.”

— Sheldon Richman

“Those who create the wealth naturally want to keep it and devote it to their own purposes. Those who wish to expropriate it look for ever more-clever ways to acquire it without inciting resistance. One of those ways is the spreading of an elaborate ideology of statism, which teaches that the people are the state and that therefore they are only paying themselves when they pay taxes.”

— Sheldon Richman

“Government spending reduces the capital that could be invested to serve consumers and to produce new employment opportunities.”

— Sheldon Richman

“The draft is a monstrous violation of individual liberty, and even a good motive cannot make it otherwise. In a free society no one should be compelled to take up arms, or be forced to kill or risk being killed ... But who can blame prospective volunteers from doubting that there is a threat from Iraq? The Bush administration has yet to make a persuasive argument to that effect.”

— Sheldon Richman

“Apologists for activist government never tire of telling us that the
benevolent state is our protector and that without it wed be at the mercy of
monsters. It is about time that we understood that the U.S. government does
more to endanger the American people than any imagined monsters around the
world ... by pursuing its Grand Foreign Policy of meddling anywhere and
everywhere.”

— Sheldon Richman

“Among other grand achievements, F. A. Hayek had a remarkable career pointing out the flaws in collectivism. One of his keenest insights was that, paradoxically, any collectivist system necessarily depends on one individual (or small group) to make key social and economic decisions. In contrast, a system based on individualism takes advantage of the aggregate, or 'collective,' information of the whole society; through his actions each participant contributes his own particular, if incomplete, knowledge-information that could never be tapped by the individual at the head of a collectivist state.”

— Sheldon Richman

We must acknowledge, of course, that what looks like failure to us Americans outside the privileged elite may not actually be failure for our overlords.

— Sheldon Richman

Perhaps the deterioration of American education is illustrated by the high correlation between the number of years a person has attended school and his inability to understand the words "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." It is more likely, though, that those who interpret the Second Amendment to preclude an individual right to own guns are driven by their political agenda. Whichever the case, they do themselves no credit when they tell us that a simple, elegant sentence means the opposite of what it clearly says.

— Sheldon Richman

Why is Netanyahu pushing war? Among several reasons, demonizing Iran reduces pressure on Israel to negotiate seriously with the Palestinians. Many Israelis prefer building Jewish settlements on Palestinians' land instead. Moreover, Israel's rulers oppose any development-such as an Iranian-U.S. detente-that could diminish Israel's U.S.-financed hegemony in the region. War with Iran would be a catastrophe all around. Netanyahu and his hawkish American allies-the same people who gave us the disastrous Iraq war and ISIS-must be repudiated.

— Sheldon Richman