Top 15 David R. Henderson Quotes

It is not always easy to define property rights. What is striking, though, is how often government legislation and court rulings have prevented the common law system from handling pollution problems even when common law seemed to be working well toward resolving them.

West points out that early in the nineteenth century, the British government was quite upset about the number of working-class people who were reading political literature. The government, writes West, took ‘fiscal and legal action against the spread of newspapers, especially those critical of government.’

People often criticize government schools in the United States for teaching little and doing it in boring ways, yet many advocate increasing the amount of time that children are in school. This reminds me of the old joke about two people complaining about the food at a restaurant. ‘The food tastes awful,’ says one. The other replies, ‘And the portions are so small.’ Given the amount of oppression and simple boredom that goes on in government schools today, thank goodness the portions are so small.

The government’s monopoly is what has allowed it to produce so bad a product for so long.

Unfortunately, not content to enforce its monopoly power over what new drugs get produced, the FDA also seeks to limit doctor’s uses of legal drugs for uses not specified on the label.

The efficacy regulations on drugs, economists have found in countless studies, have delayed the introduction of new drugs by years and added hundreds of millions of dollars to the cost of developing a typical new drug.

I noted that one reason we buy so much health care is that the price to us is artificially low; if we paid the full price for health care, we would make better life-style decisions on exercise, smoking, and foods and would need less health care.

Health care costs so darn much because we pay so darn little for it… So we have almost no incentive to care about how much it cost… Most of what we spend on health care is other people’s money. We never spend other people’s money as carefully as we spend our own.

There are two main differences between Ponzi’s original scam and the Social Security system. The first difference is that Social Security is run by the government and, whatever its constitutionality and its questionable ethics, is legal. The second difference follows from the first: Whereas Ponzi had to rely on suckers, the government can and does use force.

One thing we know from centuries of history is that if the government has revenue to spend, it will spend it.

Why did all these people—Lady Godiva, the barons of England, William Tell, the Founding Fathers of the United States, and Henry David Thoreau—oppose taxes? Because they understood that taxation is, in essence, legalized theft. When a government taxes you, it takes something you own without your consent. That’s exactly what a thief does. The main difference is that the thief is breaking the law, whereas the government is (usually) taking your money legally.

British author Thomas Carlyle called economics ‘the dismal science’ because the free-market economists around him were strongly opposed to slavery.

The bottom line is that in a free market, any employer who discriminates on grounds that have nothing to do with productivity will pay a cost for doing so. The economic system that removes the props from racism is free markets.

Throughout history, governments have generally been much less tolerant of racial difference than private employers have been. This is because the government officials who discriminate incur no cost for doing so, as long as discrimination is politically acceptable…

Early in the twentieth century, the railroad business was highly unionized. Just as in South Africa, employers often wanted to hire black people. But unions run by white people excluded blacks from membership and often committed acts of violence against black workers who tried to get such jobs.