Richard Epstein Quotes

What the government gives it must first take away.

Government can only spend a dollar to help someone when it forcibly takes a dollar from someone else.

It's all right to agree or disagree on the balanced budget amendment. It's all right to talk about how we're going to appropriate.

The Democrats want government to do the spending. Senator McCain wants families to do the spending.

The idea that more taxes and more government spending is the best way to help hardworking middle class taxpayers - that's an old idea that's failed every time it's been tried.

Government can’t deliver a free lunch to the country as a whole. It can, however, determine who pays for lunch.

Supply and demand don’t work on a legislative schedule.

If you tax something, you get less of it. If you subsidize something, you get more of it.

It's widely accepted that it is reasonable for a government to use tax policy to change behaviour.

Politics is involved when you don't tackle inefficiency and burden people with higher tariffs.

Everybody has to remember that economics is very tied to politics.

Government has no money of its own. All it does is take resources from one group and given them to another.

The Democratic Party might be called the Takings Coalition, made up of groups that want the government to take from American citizens -- usually cash -- and keep it for itself.

Political Economy as a branch of science is extremely modern; but the subject with which its enquiries are conversant has in all ages necessarily constituted one of the chief practical interests of mankind.

The federal government's most useful role is not to rush into a program of excessive increases in public expenditures, but to expand the incentives and opportunities for private expenditures.

The government does not add value to the economy. It removes value from the economy by imposing taxes on one citizen and providing cash to another.

Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem. […] Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them. Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it. […] The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much.

Microeconomics is about money you don't have, and macroeconomics is about money the government is out of.

The money has to go to the federal government because the federal government will spend that money better than the private sector will spend it.

Government has no wealth of its own. Before it gives anything to anyone, it must take from those who produced it.

For government to give, it must first take away.

The government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn't first take from someone else.

The Democrats believe they need more of your money to spend because they can spend it better than you can. But you know, sometimes philosophers don't act.

There are lots of other things that affect state growth besides state taxes. However, the reason I look at taxes is because these are policy variables that can be changed by state governments in order to get better results than they otherwise had.

There is a difference between Senator Obama and Senator McCain. Senator Obama believes that the government ought to be able to take as much as it thinks it needs from anybody.