By virtue of exchange, one man's prosperity is beneficial to all others.
- Frederic Bastiat
The key insight of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.
- Milton and Rose Friedman
Free to Choose, 1980, p.13.
The evidence is overwhelmingly persuasive that the massive increase in world competition—a consequence of broadening trade flows—has fostered markedly higher standards of living for almost all countries who have participated in cross-border trade. I include most especially the United States.
- Alan Greenspan
Speech: Boston, Massachusetts, June 2, 1999.
The division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature . . . ; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.
- Adam Smith
Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937), p. 13.
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