The real minimum wage is zero.

It is just as important that business keep out of government as that government keep out of business.

The problem with being an employee or self-employed is you pay the highest taxes.

If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains; if you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains.

Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.

I think my top salary was maybe in 1966. I made $17,000 and 11 of that came from selling other players‘ equipment.

Markets have built in inefficiencies, serious inefficiencies which are well known.

We’ve switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics – trying to play a serious part in the world – to a culture that’s really entertainment-based.

No nation was ever ruined by trade.

Gold is hoarded. It’s estimated that 95 percent of all gold ever mined is still around.

It’s extremely difficult to get these jobs because you can’t get a job on a ship unless you have seaman’s paper’s, and you can’t get seaman’s papers unless you have a job on a ship. There had to be a way to break through the circle, and he was the one who arranged it for me.

Free trade is not based on utility but on justice.

All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.

By rendering the labor of one, the property of the other, they cherish pride, luxury, and vanity on one side; on the other, vice and servility, or hatred and revolt.

It is a way to take people’s wealth from them without having to openly raise taxes. Inflation is the most universal tax of all.

Employers have decided that having the breadth of knowledge that’s associated with a four-year degree is often something they want to see in the people they give that job to.

Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.

A young man who does not have what it takes to perform military service is not likely to have what it takes to make a living. Today’s military rejects include tomorrow’s hard-core unemployed.

Men don’t and can’t live by exchanging articles, but by producing them. They don’t live by trade, but by work. Give up that foolish and vain title of Trades Unions; and take that of laborers Unions.

A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production, and the wage-slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer.

The first four and a half years was me in the studio every day, writing songs for other people. I had jobs, too – eleven jobs. I worked at Kinko’s, Fatburger, Subway – I was a sandwich artist – and I was a claims processor at Allstate Insurance.

I’m not a macroeconomics person.

It has so happened in all ages of the world that some have labored, and others have, without labor, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits.

Socialists tend to want to pay people more money to do less work, and capitalists tend to want to provide better products at better prices.

Jobs are a centuries-old concept created during the Industrial Revolution. Despite the reality that we’re now deep in the Information Age, many people are studying for, or working at, or clinging to the Industrial Age idea of a safe, secure job.

A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing.

It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today. The 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans. The cornerstones of the middle-class security all bear the union label.

Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it.

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

Every time the Fed implements ‚quantitative easing,‘ a.k.a. printing more money, two things go up: taxes and inflation. When taxes and inflation go up, more jobs are lost.

Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners, and necessity has made us allies. Those whom God has so joined together, let no man put asunder.

Well, I thought the deal was, when you went to work for the government you weren’t supposed to make money!

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so.

I like working-class people, generally speaking.

I am not worried about the deficit. It is big enough to take care of itself.

I believe that economics is based on scarcity of markets. And it’s possible to monetize your art without compromising the integrity of it for commerce.

What is a danger is that we stay stuck in a new normal where unemployment rates stay high, people who have jobs see their incomes go up, businesses make big profits. But they’re learned to do more with less, and so they don’t hire.

Debt is a social and ideological construct, not a simple economic fact.

The pace at which people are taking to digital technology defies our stereotypes of age, education, language and income.

My family was mostly unemployed working class.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

I had very good support from Democrats and Republicans all throughout my administration. I had a very high batting average. We added more jobs per year in my four years than any other president since the Second World War.

The rise in the price of gold is a sign that capitalism has stumbled.

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

I had to abandon free market principles in order to save the free market system.

During most of my freelancing, I made what I would have made in charge of the cafeteria at a pretty good junior-high school.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

Rich countries can afford to overpay for things.

Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil. Capital in some form or other will always be needed.

Not only our future economic soundness but the very soundness of our democratic institutions depends on the determination of our government to give employment to idle men.

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.

There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.

I’m a working-class person, working with class.

I’m touring the world, not doing nothing against the law, getting money to feed my family. I got employees that have felonies, and they can’t get jobs. They work for me.

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples‘ money.

The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it’s the right thing to do. It’s economics 101, elementary stuff.

Competition is not only the basis of protection to the consumer, but is the incentive to progress.

The Federal Reserve has an official commitment to two different policies. One is to prevent inflation from getting too high. The second is to maintain high employment… the European Central Bank has only the first. It has no commitment to keep employment up.

As you know, low demand and high supply means a drop in value of anything, including the dollar.

What do you think a stimulus is? It’s spending – that’s the whole point! Seriously.

Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.