Pierre Andre Rinfret Quotes

When you grow up in the Soviet society under the communists you heard about the one man who is especially dangerous, especially crazy, and absolutely mad, and which would destroy all the human beings and the economies and so on, and this man was called Milton Friedman.

Milton Friedman’s misfortune is that his economic policies have been tried.

Most policy makers embrace a religious-like belief that the market can and should solve every problem.

Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined 'free market' is the first step towards understanding capitalism.

With the passing of Milton Friedman on November 16, 2006, we lost one of the great champions of free markets.

It reflects a reversion to the old idea that the tree can be fertilized at the top instead of at the bottom — the old trickle-down theory.

Never trust an economist with your job. Learn about economics yourself. And make up your own mind about what might protect your job-and what might destroy it.

How did we get into this mess? Because the press, during the 1980s committed one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century. The media took a dive, caved in, and did not tell the American people the price they would eventually pay for Reaganomics.

Let’s throw the economists out and use common sense instead.

Under Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., there was a rewriting of the basic rules of capitalism. These two governments changed the rules governing labour bargaining, weakening trade unions, and they weakened anti-trust enforcement, allowing more monopolies to be created.

I'm a big fan of economist Milton Freidman.

I was very identified with and accused of being a neo-liberal with respect to the economy.

Neoliberalism considers the discourse of equality, justice, and democracy quaint, if not dangerous and must be either trivialized, turned into its Orwellian opposite, or eviscerated from public life.

In the 1980s, we were advised, why don't you follow Reaganomics or Thatcherite economics. We said, yes, there are good points, let's see how we can fit them in the Indian economy. Every country has its own way of moving forward.

It is certainly safe, in view of the movement to the right of intellectuals and political thinkers, to pronounce the brain death of socialism.

I don't think Obama understands basic economics. Not economics that work. He may understand some theory that someone in Princeton sat and dreamed up, but it's not working.

I am sure future historians will say the biggest and most astonishing change in politics has been the embracing of all the tenets of Thatcherism by the party of Keir Hardie: trade union legislation, Europe, the replacement of Trident, 10 per cent tax for people who have made millions from their companies.

The difficulty for the Government is there's this ideological straitjacket of the market will provide, let the market rip and everything will work out... It's back to trickle-down economics, which, it's plain to see, have not delivered.

I believe Mrs. Thatcher's emphasis on enterprise was right.

Conservatives have long argued, correctly, that 'fine-tuning' the economy is a chimera, but that argument seems to have disappeared from the conservative handbook.

Thatcherism has become bigger than she ever was.

Nothing beats Reaganomics—though herpes can run it pretty close.

Except in certain enclaves of absurdity and irrelevance, such as the universities and the Public Broadcasting System, virtually no one in the world believes any more that there is a system preferable to ours: more benign, more equitable, more productive. Another way many people liked to refer to what we were doing was waging "a battle of ideas." That battle, at least among serious people, is now over. We have won it.... [I]t is the sight of these stricken, homeless orphans of the Left that convinces us that our work in this Committee has been successfully concluded.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the outcome he predicted yesterday did not happen today.

I was in search of a one-armed economist so that the guy could never make a statement and then say, "On the other hand ...