Economic Illusion Quotes

Money is a bubble that never pops. It's a consensus hallucination.

We ... deceive ourselves in believing that competition can secure for the public fair treatment in such cases.

The Townsend Plan is an attempt to mint the moonlight into silver and coin the sunshine into gold.

If people want to follow an illusion that you don't have to pay your way, you don't have to measure up, then there are serious consequences for any country.

It was self-serving politicians who convinced recent generations of Americans that we could all stand in a circle with our hands in each other’s pockets and somehow get rich.

Financiers live in a world of illusion. They count on something which they call the capital of the country, which has no existence.

The most obvious and yet the oldest and most stubborn error on which the appeal of inflation rests is that of confusing ‘money’ with ‘wealth’…Real wealth, of course, consists in what is produced and consumed: the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in. It is railways and roads and motor cars; ships and planes and factories; schools and churches and theaters; pianos, paintings and books. Yet so powerful is the verbal ambiguity that confuses money with wealth, that even those who at times recognize the confusion will slide back into it in the course of their reasoning.

That which seems to be wealth may in verity be only the gilded index of far reaching ruin

The government pretends to be endowed with the mystical power to accord favors out of an inexhaustible horn of plenty. It is both omniscient and omnipotent. It can by a magic wand create happiness and abundance. The truth is the government cannot give if it does not take from somebody.

I started by saying that one of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that the problem of production has been solved. This illusion, I suggested, is mainly due to our inability to recognize that the modern industrial system, with all its intellectual sophistication, consumes the very basis on which is has been erected. To use the language of the economist, it lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as income.

People have put a lot of faith in the government's ability to get growth going in China. People have this, what I think, illusion that there are six people in China who really have their hand on every button. And what we're learning is, it's a very big economy and they're not that good at it.

The notion that somehow through a trade war or protectionism or magical thinking that we're going to return to a romanticized economic past is, in the end, going to be an illusion. And a severe disappointment to millions of decent, hard-working people.

There's nothing wrong with creating jobs. What's wrong is to seed the illusion that you will magically bring back the economy of 1970, that you will reopen coal mines.

The public is looking for free lunches, and the political competition for votes makes the politicians offer them free lunches.

Thanks to the central bank, most "monetary experts" and "leading macro-economists" can, by putting them on the payroll, be turned into government propagandists "explaining," like alchemists, how stones (paper) can be turned into bread (wealth).

The economic illusion is the belief that social justice is bad for economic growth.