Misallocation of Resources Quotes

I view roads as a source of boundless patronage to the executive, jobbing to members of Congress and their friends, and a bottomless abyss of public money. You will begin by only appropriating the surplus of the post office revenues; but the other revenues will soon be called into their aid, and it will be a source of eternal scramble among the members, who can get the most money wasted in their State

Delhi is bleeding, while the government spends money on ads.

Our earliest evidence of government, in the ruins of Babylon and Egypt, shows nothing but ziggurats and pyramids of wasted taxpayer money, the TARP funds and shovel-ready stimulus programs of their day.

It's bad for baseball to have owners who can benefit another business by losing money in baseball.

Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works.

What I think is wrong is spending £9m of taxpayers' money on one particular piece of one-sided propaganda.

A mistake I've made is investing in my idea rather than the entrepreneur's. Sometimes I'm excited about an idea that is similar to the entrepreneur's idea - but not the same. A smart entrepreneur will convince me it is the same, until I write a check!

From the Great Depression, to the stagflation of the seventies, to the current economic crisis caused by the housing bubble, every economic downturn suffered by this country over the past century can be traced to Federal Reserve policy. The Fed has followed a consistent policy of flooding the economy with easy money, leading to a misallocation of resources and an artificial 'boom' followed by a recession or depression when the Fed-created bubble bursts.

Finding a 'sacrificial lamb' on whom to tag blame for complicated problems is an important instrument in the toolkit of politicians, because it deflects blame for the nation's economic woes away from their own regulatory lapses, economic mismanagement and coddling to labor unions.

Government subsidies can be critically analyzed according to a simple principle: You are smarter than the government, so when the government pays you to do something you wouldn't do on your own, it is almost always paying you to do something stupid.

When our financial system - essentially our money managers, marketers of investment products and stockbrokers - put up zero percent of the capital and assume zero percent of the risk yet receive fully 80% of the return, something has gone terribly wrong in our financial system.

Jimmy Carter as President is like Truman Capote marrying Dolly Parton. The job is just too big for him.

Taxpayer money should not have to be spent to save a misguided and mismanaged enterprise.

We have government by the clueless, over a place they’ve never been, using means they don’t possess.

Administrators are another curious consequence of a bureaucracy which has forgotten its reason for being

In the rush to become all things to all people, the federal government has lost sight of its core responsibilities. As a result we're stuck in this frustrating paradox where Washington actually neglects things it's clearly supposed to be doing, while interfering in other areas where they are neither welcome nor authorized.

What typically happens in government is the exact opposite of how things should work.

Since we were kids, we grow up believing that astronauts are heroes - that to go up in a rocket is a heroic thing. These guys are bigger than movie stars. To me, it's... all a well-dressed-up lie, basically. There's billions spent on rockets up there, and there's millions starving down here. It don't make sense to me.

We cannot afford to deliberately cripple our cities by transferring public tax dollars to private entities for benefits that are unclear at best.

If someone really wants my company's business, why shouldn't he be able to do everything he can - including paying me off - to get that business? Because bribery encourages people to make decisions based on the wrong criteria, which means in the business world that it distorts the efficient allocation of resources.

WHO has become so corrupted, mismanaged and irrelevant that many public health leaders around the world are calling for it to be shut down

Such schemes take money from people who can least afford to spend it to support an unneeded bureaucracy that eats money people thought they were providing for education.

In some egregious cases, cities built new stadiums even while their citizens were still paying off old stadiums that had since closed. This is corporate welfare run amok, and a gross misuse of American citizens' tax money - something the government must treat with respect.

I always tend to assume there's an infinite amount of money out there." There might as well be, "Arsibalt said, "but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators.

We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. But they've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.