Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If most people are not willing to see the difficulty, this is mainly because, consciously or unconsciously, they assume that it will be they who will settle these questions for the others, and because they are convinced of their own capacity to do this.
It is no accident that on the whole there was more beauty and decency to be found in the life of the small peoples, and that among the large ones there was more happiness and content in proportion as they had avoided the deadly blight of centralization.
The Chicago Economics Department was in intellectual ferment, although the central issues of the 1930s were very different from those in later times. I had never before encountered minds of that quality at close quarters and they influenced me strongly.
Household spending growth has been particularly solid in 2015, with purchases of new motor vehicles especially strong. Job growth has bolstered household income, and lower energy prices have left consumers with more to spend on other goods and services.
Marx, however imperfectly he worked out the details, set himself the task of discovering the law of motion of capitalism, and if there is any hope of progress in economics at all, it must be in using academic methods to solve the problems posed by Marx.
Canada is a place of infinite promise. We like the people, and if one ever had to emigrate, this would be the destination, not the U.S.A. The hills, lakes and forests make it a place of peace and repose of the mind, such as one never finds in the U.S.A.
Some refugees will find it relatively easy to find jobs. A university-educated Syrian civil engineer arriving in Munich will need to learn some German, but once this is done, he or she is unlikely to have to wait too long before employers come knocking.
Germany cannot get out of the euro. What it has to do, therefore, is make the economy more flexible - to eliminate the restrictions on prices, on wages and on employment; in short, the regulations that keep 10 percent of the German workforce unemployed.
The majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives. Promoting this ideology among the people is the vital social task of the 'intellectuals.'
It's a whole different attitude toward public service than it once was. I tell you, we can all sit around in our old age and moan about it, but I think the administrative processes and the management effectiveness of the federal government are terrible!
My parents were admirers of President Roosevelt and the New Deal. Their parents and most of our relatives and neighbors were Republicans, so they were self-conscious in their liberalism and took it as emblematic of their ability to think for themselves.
The wealth-income ratio in the United States has always been lower than in Europe. The main reason in the early years was that land values bulked less in the wide open spaces of North America. There was, of course, much more land, but it was very cheap.
The way to get people's votes is to say that all their problems are caused by other people, and that you will stop those other people from giving them trouble. But if you really want to help, then you can tell them the truth and risk losing their votes.
Against the background of the Obama administration' s negotiating what can turn out to be the most catastrophic international agreement in the nation's history, to complain about protocol is to put questions of etiquette above questions of annihilation.
The stricter standards and independent, often conclusive, evidence in the physical sciences cannot be generalized to intellectual activity as a whole, even though the aura of scientific processes and results is often appropriated by other intellectuals.
Government schools can go for decades delivering low-quality services, and what's the result? The people who manage it earn higher pay. It's nearly impossible to fire the incompetents. And, taxpayers, who support the service, are given higher tax bills.
It used to be that almost all innovation came from the U.S. and a small number of other developed countries. That's no longer the case, and as China and India grow, it's changing even more. Expect a lot more Chinese and Indian Nobel prizes in the future.
I think that there's a real sense in which pregnancy should be something that you do with your doctor, but I think that for a lot of women the time you have with your doctors is limited and it can be difficult to get all of the answers to your questions.
The Chicago Economics Department was in intellectual ferment, although the central issues of the 1930's were very different from those in later times. I had never before encountered minds of that quality at close quarters and they influenced me strongly.
Free market economists frequently see minimum wage legislation as mere political intervention. However, there are decent economic theories which show that, under certain circumstances, minimum wages can be beneficial, as it makes workers more productive.
Every individual is a potential gold buyer, although he may not need the gold. It may be added to the store of personal wealth, and passed from generation to generation as an object of family wealth. There is no other economic good as marketable as gold.
Because food and energy prices are volatile, it is often helpful to look at inflation excluding those two categories - known as core inflation - which is typically a better indicator of future overall inflation than recent readings of headline inflation.
Unfortunately, the real focus in this country has not been on the rest of the world. It's been on our own issues and our own problems. Fair enough. But it means that our simple hopes that everything will just work out abroad aren't really coming to pass.
The roots of the crisis in East Asia were in private sector decisions. The biggest problems were the misallocation of investment, most notably to speculative real estate, and risky financing, especially borrowing short-term debt on international markets.
Europe has never had a single or unified voice in world affairs: a common foreign policy. It has often appeared to be rudderless and unable to make quick decisions when faced with economic crises, presenting instead an image of division and hopelessness.
So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free-enterprise system.
When government - in pursuit of good intentions - tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player.
Libertarians regard the state as the Supreme, the eternal, the best organized aggressor against the persons and property of the mass of the public. All states everywhere, whether democratic, dictatorial, or monarchical, whether red, white, blue or brown.
On the market, all is harmony. But as soon as intervention appears and is established, conflict is created, for each may participate in a scramble to be a net gainer rather than a net loser - to be part of the invading team instead of one of the victims.
But when reason and the study of history began revealing the irrationality, the limitations, and the merely transitory nature of the capitalist order, bourgeois ideology as a whole and with it bourgeois economics began abandoning both reason and history.
The lesson for businesses is you are dealing with real people. Those are your customers, those are your employees, those are your bosses, and the better you understand how real people tick, the more successfully you will be able to accomplish your goals.
Capitalism is the only society in human history in which neither tradition nor conscious direction supervises the total effort of the community; it is the only society in which the future, the needs for tomorrow, are entirely left to an automatic system.
Fear causes individuals to restrain their spending and firms to withhold investments; as a result, the economy weakens, confirming their fear and leading them to restrain spending further. The downturn deepens, and a vicious circle of despair takes hold.
The main reason why it is profitable to establish a firm would seem to be that there is a cost of using the price mechanism. The most obvious cost of 'organizing' production through the price mechanism is that of discovering what the relevant prices are.
My professional apprenticeship at Iowa State College from 1930 to 1943 could not have been better; the Great Depression made it so, and the talented younger economists at Ames during that period made it an exciting and profitable intellectual experience.
The most politically painless way to hand out goodies, without taking responsibility for their costs, is to pass a law saying that somebody else must provide those goodies at their expense, while the politicians take credit for generosity and compassion.
Riskier mortgage lending practices, imposed by government, were what set the stage for many mortgage payments to stop and thus for the financial disasters that followed. Political rhetoric, echoed in the media, seeks to obscure that painfully plain fact.
I believe - I'm not a political expert, but I believe there is a broad consensus, a middle ground if you will, that Democrats and Republicans, business people and workers can agree on, to get this - the economy growing faster, getting people back to work.
All I'll say is if you look at countries where it is - where they are rapidly growing, they're investing in their infrastructure. They're investing in their educations. They are trying to streamline regulations, but they're not neglecting key investments.
Information costs are reduced by the existence of large numbers of buyers and sellers. Under these conditions, prices embody the same information that would require large search costs by individual buyers and sellers in the absence of an organized market.
I was opposed to World War II, and indeed on June 22, 1941 when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union I suddenly found myself the lone supporter of peace since everybody else had, because of their communist beliefs, shifted over to become supporters of the war.
People become less inhibited from wanting to change social and economic conditions in a radical fashion according to their own interests, and from being prepared to think of state intervention in ever wider spheres as possible and useful for this purpose.
Wherever politics intrudes upon economic life, political success is readily attained by saying what people like to hear rather than what is demonstrably true. Instead of safeguarding truth and honesty, the state then tends to become a major source of insi
All the impoverishing effects of socialism are with us in the U.S.: reduced levels of investment and saving, the misallocation of resources, the overutilization and vandalization of factors of production, and the inferior quality of products and services.
Public officials are permitted to finance or subsidize their own activities through taxes. That is, they are permitted to engage in and live off, what in private dealings between private law subjects is prohibited and considered 'theft' and 'stolen loot.'
The inborn instability of capitalism has been part of the history of the system for several hundred years, including recurrent speculative episodes. There should be no doubt in anyone's mind that we're now having another one of those speculative episodes.
By taxing CO2, firms and households would have an incentive to retrofit for the world of the future. The tax would also provide firms with incentives to innovate in ways that reduce energy usage and emissions - giving them a dynamic competitive advantage.
Throughout the years following World War II and until the formation of the European Economic Community in 1958, I was very active as a national or international rapporteur at many of the international conferences aiming to establish an European community.
As a nation, we have been responsible for the murder of literally hundreds of thousands of people at home and abroad by fighting a war that should never have been started and can be won, if at all, only by converting the United States into a police state.
So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear. That there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.