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 It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society--the farmers, mechanics, and laborers--who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their government. There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing.
Andrew Jackson
https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=11&psid=3803
When the FDA endeavors to protect us from ourselves, it ends up preventing us from protecting ourselves.
William Dwyer
Governments play a critical role in the wealth-creating process by enforcing property rights and contracts—legal mechanisms that facilitate voluntary transactions. ... 'The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law.' Ayn Rand.
Luke Froeb
Managerial Economics: A Problem-Solving Approach (MBA Series) Second Edition
"The biggest problems that we're facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all. And that's what I intend to reverse when I'm president of the United States."
Barack H. Obama
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/29/AR2009072902624.html
America's economic might is rooted in an entrepreneurial culture and a passion for innovation and risk-taking, traits nourished by the nation's commitment to the rule of law, property rights, and a predictable set of tax and regulatory policies. Policymakers have lost sight of these fundamental principles in recent years. The next era of American prosperity will be hastened when they return to them.
Guy Sorman
Wall Street Journal (online); Dec. 13, 2012
... the government must never try to prop up unsound business situations; it must never bail out or lend money to business firms in trouble. Doing this will simply prolong the agony and convert a sharp and quick depression phase into a lingering and chronic disease. The government must never try to prop up wage rates or prices of producer's goods; doing so will prolong and delay indefinitely the completion of the depression-adjustment process; it will cause indefinite and prolonged depression and mass unemployment in the vital capital goods industries. The government must not try to inflate again, in order to get out of the depression. For even if this reinflation succeeds, it will only sow greater trouble later on. The government must do nothing to encourage consumption, and it must not increase its own expenditures, for this will further increase the social consumption/investment ratio. In fact, cutting the government budget will improve the ratio. What the economy needs is not more consumption spending but more saving, in order to validate some of the excessive investments of the boom.
Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Depressions: Their Cause and Cure, 1969
Trades, to me, can't be forced. Trades happen because two sides each get something they want. Even if you think you have a need and want to do it, there has to be a fit. Somebody else has to have a need.
Ken Holland, Detroit Red Wings' GM
... this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.
Karl Marx
The Communist Manifesto, Section 2: Proletarians and Communists
In a sense, Britain inadvertently, through it actions in Hong Kong, did more to reduce world poverty than all the aid programs that we've undertaken in the last century.
Paul Romer
http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer.html [~minute mark 10:40]
The present workers of the United States Steel Corporation will receive their pensions in twenty, thirty or forty years. Today a pension of one hundred dollars a month means a rather substantial allowance. What will it mean in 1980 or 1990? Today, as the Welfare Commissioner of the City of New York has shown, 52 cents can buy all the food a person needs to meet the daily caloric and protein requirements. How much will 52 cents buy in 1980? Such is the issue. What the workers are aiming at in striving after social security and pensions is, of course, security. But their "social gain" withers away with the drop in the dollar's purchasing power. In enthusiastically supporting the Fair Deal's fiscal policy, the union members are themselves frustrating all their social security and pension schemes.
Ludwig von Mises
The Commercial and Financial Chronicle, February 23, 1950
The main problem for this country is: Will the United States follow the course of the economic policies adopted by almost all foreign nations, even by many of those which had been foremost in the evolution of capitalism? ... To answer such a question one must look upon the ideas about economic matters held by public opinion. The question is: Do the American voters know that the unprecedented improvement in their standard of living that the last hundred years brought was the result of a steady rise in the per-head quota of capital invested? Do they realize that every measure leading to capital decumulation jeopardizes their prosperity? ... Today only the businessmen worry about the provision of new capital for the expansion and improvement of their plants. The rest of the people are indifferent with regard to this issue, not knowing that their well-being and that of their children is at stake. What is needed is to make the importance of these problems understood by everybody. No party platform is to be considered as satisfactory that does not contain the following point: As the prosperity of the nation and the height of wage rates depend on a continual increase in the capital invested in its plants, mines and farms, it is one of the foremost tasks of good government to remove all obstacles that hinder the accumulation and investment of new capital.
Ludwig von Mises
Address delivered before the University Club of Milwaukee (Wisconsin) on October 13, 1952.
In a different age, Mr. Obama would have been the guy who went out and bought an Edsel. In this age, Mr. Obama is the guy demanding that you buy an Edsel, too.
Bret Stephens
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203335504578086450730075938.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Despite the rise in the income of the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers as a statistical category, both absolutely and relative to the incomes in other categories, as flesh-and-blood human beings those individuals who were in that category initially had their incomes actually fall by a whopping 50 percent between 1996 and 2005.
Thomas Sowell
Book: Intellectuals and Society. Basic Books; p. 38
They have tried to sell us this trickle-down tax cut fairy dust before. Guess what? We've seen this before. It didn't work then. It will not work now. It's not a plan to create jobs. It is not a plan to lower our deficit.
President Barack Obama
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/obama-slams-romneys-fairy-dust-tax-cut-024736068.html
The lack of money is the root of all evil
Mark Twain
The [obesity] epidemic was caused by the overproduction of food in the United States. Beginning in the 1970s, there was a change in national agricultural policy. Instead of the government paying farmers not to engage in full production, as was the practice, they were encouraged to grow as much food as they could. At the same time, technological changes and the 'green revolution' made our farms much more productive. The price of food plummeted, while the number of calories available to the average American grew by about 1,000 a day.
Carson Chow
National Institutes of Health, The New York Times, May 14, 2012
... we have all on occasion been asked whether there's a bubble in the market for residential housing; ... whether household and firm balance sheets will remain strong when interest rates rise; what risks to the financial system are posed by the government-sponsored enterprises; and how Basel II and other regulatory developments are likely to affect the structure and profitability of the domestic banking system. One's inclination is to answer by painting a benign picture so as not to cause unnecessary public concern. On the other hand, financial conditions do change, and it's our collective responsibility both to monitor those changes and to communicate truthfully to the public what we see.
Ben Bernanke
Meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee on March 16, 2004. [ http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/files/FOMC20040316meeting.pdf ]
The goal for corporations is to maximize profit and market share. And they also have a goal for their target, namely the population. They have to be turned into completely mindless consumers of goods that they do not want. You have to develop what are called created wants. So you have to create wants. You have to impose on people what's called a philosophy of futility. You have to focus them on the insignificant things of life, like fashionable consumption. I'm just basically quoting business literature. And it makes perfect sense. The ideal is to have individuals who are totally disassociated from one another. Whose conception of themselves, the sense of value, is just: "How many created wants can I satisfy?"
Noam Chomsky
Documentary: The Corporation (2003) [ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379225/ ]
You know, I've often thought it's very ironic that I'm able to do all this and yet what am I on? I'm on networks. I'm distributed by studios that are owned by large corporate entities. Now, why would they put me out there when I am opposed to everything that they stand for? And I spend my time on their dime opposing what they believe in. Okay? Well, it's because they don't believe in anything. They put me on there because they know that there's[sic] millions of people that want to see my film or watch the TV show, and so they're going to make money. And I've been able to get my stuff out there because I'm driving my truck through this incredible flaw in capitalism, the greed flaw. The thing that says the rich man will sell you the rope to hang himself with if he thinks he can make a buck off it. Well, I'm the rope.
Michael Moore
Documentary: The Corporation (2003) [ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379225/ ]
We mutually benefit from specialization and value-proxies and shared experience and knowledge, but as soon as we start gaming risk and shedding it onto others, we are a social cancer, and healthy, ethical economies can only tolerate a fringe of that, not an institutionalization of that.
Fred Bartlett
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/Blogs/0143.shtml#6
According to Nash's theorem, your response in the Trust Game should be simply to keep whatever comes to you, even though you know some other person increased your wealth partly in the hope that you'd reciprocate. ... the unintended consequence of such "rational" behavior--that is, looking out for number one--is for both of you to miss the opportunity to gain by creating a larger pie, then sharing it. ... Yet with all deference to John Nash and his Nobel Prize, the Trust Game shows that rational self-interest is bupkis when it comes to real people. ... With large sums or small, in dollars or dinars, participants almost always behave with more trust and trustworthiness than the established theories predict they will.
Paul J. Zak
Book: The Moral Molecule -- The source of love and prosperity. 2012. Dutton; p 8
[Referring to the disvalue of statism as a social system for mankind] PASOK and New Democracy have long used the public sector to give patronage jobs to supporters. ... So the government created a monster that was more powerful than the government itself.
Manos Matsaganis
http://www.wbur.org/npr/150804420/george-papandreou-greece-had-to-make-changes
Marx ... did not quite grasp that formal property was not simply an instrument for appropriation but also the means to motivate people to create real additional usable value. Moreover, he did not see that it is the mechanisms contained in the property system itself that give assets and the labor invested in them the form required to create capital. ... That is why Marx did not fully understand that legal property is the indispensable process that fixes and deploys capital, that without property mankind cannot convert the fruits of its labor into fungible, liquid forms that can be differentiated, combined, divided, and invested to produce surplus value.
Hernando de Soto
Book: Hernando de Soto. (2000). The Mystery of Capital. Basic Books; pp. 215-16
We consume about 25 percent of the world’s oil. We only have 2 percent of the reserves.
President Barack Obama
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/03/30/remarks-president-americas-energy-security
There cannot be any question of abolishing interest by any institutions, laws, and devices of bank manipulation. He who wants to "abolish" interst will have to induce people to value an apple available in a hundred years no less than a present apple. What can be abolished by laws and decrees is merely the right of the capitalists to receive interest. But such laws would bring about capital consumption and would very soon throw mankind back into the original state of natural poverty.
Ludwig von Mises
Human Action
In laissez-faire capitalism, the government has no function to perform with regard to money. There is no central bank. ... This is essentially the monetary system that the United States had between the Civil War and the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913. Under that system, the United states had an average annual rate of economic growth (over 5 percent a year) higher than any country has ever had over a similar period of time in the history of the world.
M. Northrup Buechner
Buechner, N. M. (2011), Objective Economics: How Ayn Rand's philosophy changes everything about economics, Lanham: University Press of America, p 19-20
[Obama] probably shouldn't be calling for what I would want, because the public should want what I want, but it doesn't.
Paul Krugman
http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/roundtable-part-ii-plan-jobs-14445346
If something doesn't work in a two-person economy, it's not good economics.
Arthur Laffer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRA71trwgtw (@ minute 3:45)
... mortgage lending to creditworthy homebuyers has been a stable, profitable, and boring business in the United States of America for about a hundred years; so for those who blame “Wall Street greed” for the crisis, I ask you “why now?” Why did greed not appear, not infect the system, not attempt to seize filthy lucre for that hundred years? Why did greed only show up at that particular moment in time? I further ask why did greed not make its way to Canada, where they did not have a housing and/or banking crisis? Is greed only a US and highly time specific phenomenon?
Donny Baseball
http://sayanythingblog.com/entry/the-one-chart-that-explains-the-entire-financial-crisis/
Earth First: We will pump the oil from the other planets later.
Anonymous
Bumper sticker on a pick-up truck.
Throughout the Bush and Clinton presidencies, Alan Greenspan, a disciple of free-market economist Friedrich Hayek and an avid reader of Ayn Rand, had served as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Greenspan had lived through the Ford/Carter inflationary years and had watched with concern the rise of federal deficits in the 1980s. Early in Clinton’s term, while interest rates remained low, the president took an action that dictated the behavior of the Fed and its chairman for the entire decade. In order to show rapid progress against the “Reagan/Bush deficits,” Clinton refinanced large chunks of the national debt at the lowest rates possible, regardless of the length of maturity. Much of this consisted of short-term bonds; but it had the effect of reducing the interest paid by the government on the debt, thus giving the appearance of reducing the deficits. By doing so, Clinton refused to refinance the debt in much longer term securities at a slightly higher rate. As long as inflation, and therefore, interest rates, stayed low, it was a good deal for the country. But the slightest uptick in inflation would add billions to the national debt and raised the specter of a massive refinancing of the debt at much higher prices. Clinton’s action in essence locked the Fed into a permanent antiinflation mode. Any good news in the economy—rising industrial production, higher employment figures, better trade numbers—might cause prices to go up, which would appear on Greenspan’s radar detector as a threat. The chairman found himself raising the prime rate repeatedly, trying to slow down the stock market. It was a perverse situation, to say the least: the most powerful banker in America constantly slapping the nation’s wage-earners and entrepreneurs for their success. Worse, Greenspan’s actions resulted in a constant underfunding of business, a steady deflation affecting long-term investment. Although few spotted it (George Gilder and Jude Wanniski were two exceptions), the nation suffered from a slow-acting capital anemia.
Larry Schweikart
A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror
The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and assistance to foreign hands should be curtailed, lest Rome fall.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
55 BC
"[there is] no clear distinction between money and non-money ... although we usually assume there is a sharp line of distinction between what is money and what is not -- and the law generally tries to make such a distinction -- so far as the causal effects of monetary events are concerned, there is no such clear difference. What we find is rather a continuum in which objects of various degrees of liquidity, or with values which can fluctuate independently of each other, shade into each other in the degree to which they function as money."
Friedrich A. Von Hayek
"The Denationalization of Money", p. 47, quoted in "The Sovereign Individual", page 198
All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management.
Franklin, D. Roosevelt
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=15445
What’s extraordinary about all this is that stimulus can’t have failed, because it never happened. Once you take state and local cutbacks into account, there was no surge of government spending.
Paul Krugman
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/the-great-abdication/
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Of all the Civil War legislation -- aside, obviously, from emancipation -- this [National Banking Act of February 1863] had the most far-reaching consequences, most of them bad. Although Congress increased the number of national banks in operation (1,650 by December 1865), the destruction of the competitive-money/private-note issue system led to a string of financial upheavals, occurring like clockwork every twenty years until 1913. Competition in money had not only given the United States the most rapidly growing economy in the world, but it had also produced numerous innovations at the state level, the most important of which, branch banking, was prohibited for national banks. Thus, not only did the National Bank and Currency Acts establish a government monopoly over money, but they also excluded the most efficient and stable form of banking yet to emerge (although that mistake would be partially corrected in the 1920s). Critics of Lincoln's big-government policies are on firm ground when they assail the banking policy of the Civil War.
Larry Schweikart
A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror
Absolutely, positively. Look what the deficit commission suggested. They suggested we do exactly what we did. They suggested we have a payroll tax. They suggested that we stimulate the economy this year into next year. They suggested that this has no impact on long-term debt because it's for two years. Look, you know this, the only people who are going to agree with me when I say this are the economists listening, left, right and center. In the middle of a recession, where we're just climbing out of it, where the economy--unemployment is still at 9.7 percent, the idea of raising taxes and reducing spending is a prescription for disaster. No one is suggesting that.
Vice Pres., Joe Biden
Biden's answer on Meet The Press regarding spending another $1 trillion after seeing deficit commission report
If you can support Star's campaign with a gift of up to $2,400 today, I would be so deeply grateful to you. Our Republican Party needs Star Parker in Congress, and so does our nation
Newt Gingrich
It is laughable to even argue with a certain person about this any longer. You'll just get tired and he will reap all the attention he craves.
Old Yeller
Millions for defense, but not a cent for tribute!
Robert Goodloe Harper
Coin Stories: Millions for Defense, but Not One Cent for Tribute
"And when we’re experiencing depression economics ... this is a situation in which virtue becomes vice and prudence is folly; what we need above all is for someone to spend more, even if the spending isn’t particularly wise ... public spending on the scale needed never seems to happen ... and what actually ended up doing the trick [for ending the Great Depression] was spending that was beyond pointless, it was actually destructive – a sort of cruel joke on the part of the gods of economics. The point is that it would have been much better if the Depression had been ended with massive spending on useful things, on roads and railroads and schools and parks. But the political consensus for spending on a sufficient scale never materialized; we needed Hitler and Hirohito instead."
Paul Krugman
"Economics is Not a Morality Play" from the oxymoronically named column "The Conscience of a Liberal"
"North Korean doctors are expected to serve the people selflessly. Because of a shortage of X-ray machines, they often must use crude fluoroscopy machines that expose them to high levels of radiation; many older North Korean doctors now suffer from cataracts as a result. They not only donate their own blood, but also small bits of skin to provide grafts for burn victims ... with anesthesia in short supply, acupuncture would be used for simpler surgeries ... patients would be strapped to the operating table to prevent them from flailing about ... the right to 'universal free medical service ... to improve working people's health' was in fact written into the North Korean constitution."
Barbara Demick
"Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea", pages 106-107
“What saved the economy and the New Deal [during the Great Depression] was the enormous public-works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs.”
Paul Krugman
Economic debate is simply a projection of political debate; it is not scientific debate. It is political debate between two irreconcilable points of view. That isn't demonstrable science, it is simply wrestling.
Fred Bartlett
The Third Depression thread
"While Friedman’s theoretical work is universally admired by professional economists, there’s much more ambivalence about his policy pronouncements and especially his popularizing. And it must be said that there were some serious questions about his intellectual honesty when he was speaking to the mass public."
Paul Krugman
Reason.com, article about Krugman, threaded comments starting at 11:51pm on 5.7.10
I do think, at a certain point you've made enough money
Barack Hussein Obama
I hope there are cameras at Andrews Air Force Base so we can see Barry come back with No Warming in Our Time. With him arriving via Carbon Pig One in an unusually virulent snowstorm would be a kind of techno-Kafka moment.
"The Zeitgeist"
Reason.com
Reid's struggle getting to 60 makes some liberals fear for their country. They lament that America has become "ungovernable." In other words, it isn't putty in their grasping little hands. Unfortunately for them, the founders created a balky system resistant to precipitate change. It is designed to frustrate ideologically drunken (and perhaps temporary) majorities insistent on passing sweeping, unpopular legislation. Reid's difficulty is exactly the way James Madison would have wanted it.
Rich Lowry
The Liberals' Weaselly Panic
I’m a conservationist, but not an environmentalist. The difference? A conservationist believes that trees are important. An environmentalist believes that trees are more important than people.
Ralph Peters
When Scientists Lie
Impersonal will is what telemarketers have.
Jordan
On the metaphysics of the will
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