Gunnar Myrdal Quotes

Study after study, not only here but in other countries, show that the most affordable housing is where there has been the least government interference with the market - contrary to rhetoric.

Contrary to the vision of the left, it was the free market which produced affordable housing - before government intervention made housing unaffordable.

There's no way to understand housing as it exists today without federal policy.

Politically, sometimes you get situations where rent control will go through. It is especially true in an emergency, where there is a sudden, sharp increase in demand for housing or a cut back in supply. People will simply not allow the marketplace to allocate housing resources and so you get pressures for rent control. Once you have it, it is hard to eliminate.

No matter how deeply wedded one may be to the free enterprise system (and I, for one, am wedded for life), one has to accept the need for positive government; one has to consider government action on a sizable scale as desirable rather than as a necessary evil.

While I am a fervent believer in free markets and limited government, there are rare instances in which government involvement is necessary.

Markets are smart and governments are dumb.

If I become mayor of London, my single biggest priority will be to build thousands more homes every year. I will set a target to make half of all the new homes that are built genuinely affordable, with first dibs for Londoners.

You could afford your house without the government if it weren't for the government.

I think it's not just a matter of building more houses, more flats. We need to have the right policies. I want people to be able to own their flats.

I am very open to looking at potential tax changes to improve housing affordability.

The more the government has centralised, the less houses we have built.

We need a government policy all-out in favor of more, denser housing.

We have passed the time of ... the laisser-faire [sic] school which believes that the government ought to do nothing but run a police force.

There is no evidence that government under Republicans will shrink. It's simply a question of what the government will do and who will benefit.

Let's face a historical truth: we have never had a "free market", we have always had government intervention in the economy, and indeed that intervention has been welcomed by the captains of finance and industry. They had no quarrel with "big government" when it served their needs.

70 to 80 percent of country economy is controlled by the Bolivian state, and the other percentage by the private sector. We admit that it's legal, constitutional, that the private sector is entitled to its own economy, but to ensure these profound changes that clearly this government is promoting, including profound changes in the food industry, what we are doing is an important step.

[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

I am against market fundamentalism. I think this propaganda that government involvement is always bad has been very successful - but also very harmful to our society.

You need a government that believes in government. It also believes in markets and wants to give markets the best, the greatest opportunity, but is trying to govern well.

Everything you heard about me is true. . . . I am not a free marketer. . . . I believe in the heavy hand of government.

We need a national ambition to build hundreds of thousands of new homes a year, both private and socially-rented - led by someone who will not take no for an answer and who will push for diggers in the ground and homes for all come what may.

The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it.

Whether we like it or not, government intervention in the face of surplus is here to stay.

Most countries choose to have government run the economy.