The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.

If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment -- assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. In America men often work long hours even when they are well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment; in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons.

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade...

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Most of us try to do too much because we are secretly afraid we will not be able to do anything at all.

Moments are the elements of profit

At this point we can finally see what's really at stake in our peculiar habit of defining ourselves simultaneously as master and slave, reduplicating the most brutal aspects of the ancient household in our very concept of ourselves, as masters of our freedoms, or as owners of our very selves. It is the only way that we can imagine ourselves as completely isolated beings. There is a direct line from the new Roman conception of liberty – not as the ability to form mutual relationships with others, but as the kind of absolute power of "use and abuse" over the conquered chattel who make up the bulk of a wealthy Roman man's household – to the strange fantasies of liberal philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, and Smith, about the origins of human society in some collection of thirty- or forty-year-old males who seem to have sprung from the earth fully formed, then have to decide whether to kill each other or begin to swap beaver pelts.

Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue.

Usually when people talk about the trickle-down theory, it has to do with economics. The richer people at the top of a society become, supposedly, the more wealth there is to trickle down to the people below. It never really works out that way, of course, because if there are 2 things people at the top can't stand, they have to be leakage and overflow.

At times there's something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism.Build a dam to take away water AWAY from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to BRING water to 40 million people. Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers?

Your comfort zone is a place where you keep yourself in a self-illusion and nothing can grow there but your potentiality can grow only when you can think and grow out of that zone.

Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been to much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting disease and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan god—Society, The State, The Government, The Commune—must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is.

Das Spiel ist der Inbegriff demokratischer Lebensart. Es ist die letzt uns verbliebene Seinsform. Der Spieltrieb ersetzt die Religiosität, beherrscht die Börse, die Politik, die Gerichtssäle, die Pressewelt, und er ist es, der uns seit Gottes Tod mental am Leben hält.

The justification of capitalism is not that the economy grows faster than it grows under any other system ... not that the goods pour forth. The justification of capitalism is that it is the only economic system consistent with the requirements of man's rational nature, that it protects man's rights and leaves each individual free to act ... based on nothing but his own uncoerced, rational judgment. That is the human mode of survival; that is what man's nature requires of him if he is to live on earth. The abundance of a capitalist economy is a consequence of its coherence with man's rational nature.

Saying that you are moral because you believe in a god is like saying you are an economist because you play monopoly.

An item is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it

The issue of false consciousness is a genuinely difficult problem that has no definite solution. We should not approve of an unequal and brutal society because surveys show that people are happy. But who has the right to tell those oppressed women or starving landless peasants that they shouldn’t be happy, if they think they are? Does anyone have the right to make those people feel miserable by telling them the ‘truth’? There are no easy answers to these questions, but they definitely tell us that we cannot rely on ‘subjective’ happiness surveys to decide how well people are doing.

The world has a very serious problem, my friend' Shiva went on. 'Poor children still die by their millions. Westerners and the global rich -- like me -- live in post-scarcity society, while a billion people struggle to get enough to eat. And we're pushing the planet towards a tipping point, where the corals die and the forests burn and life becomes much, much harder. We have the resources to solve those problems, even now, but politics and economics and nationalism all get in the way. If we could access all those minds, though...

Just like how most if not all poor boys look up to and aspire to someday be rich men, most if not all underdeveloped and developing countries look up to and aspire to someday be developed countries.

For their never-ending endeavours to obtain or retain wealth, countries desperately need companies, because they—unlike most human beings—have the means of production, and human beings, because they—unlike all companies—have the means of reproduction.

Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative.

Rejection is an opportunity for your selection.

If you can survive and won the battle over other millions of semen deposited alongside with you in your mothers womb, tell me why you cannot win the battle over challenges, difficulties and poverty? Friend, I know you will succeed because; you'd once done it in the womb.

Risk is one of the qualities of any good decision. This is so because, decision itself is a risk. Therefore, making a decision literally means, taking a risk... In tracing the histories of successful men and women, the first thing to notice in their lives is risk.

...there were certain chapters when I stopped writing, saw the domestic situation I was in and thought, "I don't want to face this world, let's get back to the hellish one I'm imagining.

Good writing, and this is especially important in a subject such as economics, must also involve the reader in the matter at hand. It is not enough to explain. The images that are in the mind of the writer must be made to reappear in the mind of the reader, and it is the absence of this ability that causes much economic writing to be condemned, quite properly, as abstract.

None of this excuses anyone from mastering the basic ideas and terminology of economics. The intelligent layman must expect also to encounter good economists who are difficult writers even though some of the best have been very good writers. He should know, moreover, that at least for a few great men ambiguity of expression has been a positive asset. But with these exceptions he may safely conclude that what is wholly mysterious in economics is not likely to be important.

Christ represents originally: 1) men before God; 2) God for men; 3) men to man.Similarly, money represents originally, in accordance with the idea of money: 1) private property for private property; 2) society for private property; 3) private property for society.But Christ is alienated God and alienated man. God has value only insofar as he represents Christ, and man has value only insofar as he represents Christ. It is the same with money.

No one cultivates in a stony-ground, instead he cultivates in a soft-rich ground. Do not expect people to invest in you if you're a lazy type.

One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.

when you become addict in to MATERIAL things in life then the TRUE natural life start to run away from you, YES! it's can give you certain pleasure in the society but in the same time it will sabotage your true HAPPINESS of life which we could have simply with GRATITUDE and FORGIVENESS

REJECTION is kind of your negative ILLUSION which has no value but it’s give you a CLUE to go for next level of your ACTION.

Your VISION and your self-willingness is the MOST powerful elements to conquer your goal

If you are not EXCITED enough at your present life its mean your future is not EXITING. Excitement will give you ENTHUSIASM and enthusiasm will give you a positive energetic LIFE STYLE which could give you a successful exiting life…

Your traditional EDUCATION is not going to CHANGE your life but the life you are experiencing that can change you. Choose a POSITIVE life STYLE with positive ATTITUDE which could bring you a life with HAPPINESS and WISDOM

Autumn is a momentum of the natures golden beauty…, so the same it’s time to find your momentum of life

How you think and create your inner world that you gonna become in your outer world. Your inner believe manifest you in the outside

CONFIDENCE is not showing off your VANITY, it’s about to be HUMBLED and KIND to others what are you truly SKILLED and PROFESSIONAL about…

Experience cannot beat logic, and interpretations of observational evidence which are not in line with the laws of logical reasoning are no refutation of these but the sign of a muddled mind (or would one accept someone’s observational report that he had seen a bird that was red and non-red all over at the same time as a refutation of the law of contradiction rather than the pronouncement of an idiot?).

Man does not know most of the rules on which he acts and even what we call his intelligence is largely a system of rules which operate on him but which he does not know.

The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education. And this offers priorities for educational policy: to provide students with the cognitive tools that are most important for grasping the modern world and that are most unlike the cognitive tools they are born with. The perilous fallacies we have seen in this chapter, for example, would give high priority to economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and statistics in any high school or college curriculum. Unfortunately, most curricula have barely changed since medieval times, and are barely changeable because no one wants to be the philistine who seems to be saying that it is unimportant to learn a foreign language, or English literature, or trigonometry, or the classics. But no matter how valuable a subject may be, there are only twenty-four hours in a day, and a decision to teach one subject is also a decision not to teach another one. The question is not whether trigonometry is important, but whether it is more important than statistics; not whether an educated person should know the classics, but whether it is more important for an educated person to know the classics than to know elementary economics. In a world whose complexities are constantly challenging our intuitions, these trade-offs cannot responsibly be avoided.

The biological equipment of a man rigidly restricts the field in which he can serve.

Spend a few hours every week studying American history, human nature, and economic theory. Start with “Economics in One Lesson.” Then try Keynes. Then Hayek. Then Marx. Then Hegel. Develop a worldview that you can articulate as well as defend. Test your theory with people who disagree with you. Debate. Argue. Adjust your philosophy as necessary.

This long-tail distribution of returns is why it's important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments.

It has been discovered that with a dull urban population, all formed under a mechanical system of State education, a suggestion or command, however senseless and unreasoned, will be obeyed if it be sufficiently repeated.

The working class had imposed upon them a sterile and authoritarian educational system which mirrored the ethos of the corporate workplace.

But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence it brings is a means and not an end. The end is what it does to the lives, life-chances and hopes of people. Look at London. Of course it matters to all of us that London's economy flourishes. But the test of the enormous wealth generated in patches of the capital is not that it contributed 20%-30% to Britain's GDP but how it affects the lives of the millions who live and work there. What kind of lives are available to them? Can they afford to live there? If they can't, it is not compensation that London is also a paradise for the ultra-rich. Can they get decently paid jobs or jobs at all? If they can't, don't brag about all those Michelin-starred restaurants and their self-dramatising chefs. Or schooling for children? Inadequate schools are not offset by the fact that London universities could field a football team of Nobel prize winners.

A guidance counselor who has made a fetish of security, or who has unwittingly surrendered his thinking to economic determinism, may steer a youth away from his dream of becoming a poet, an artist, a musician or any other of thousands of things, because it offers no security, it does not pay well, there are no vacancies, it has no "future".

Parents are not alone in focusing their expectations on success at the graduation exam: The whole education system colludes with them. The curriculum and organization of schools often date back to a colonial past, when schools were meant to train a local elite to be the effective allies of the colonial state, and the goal was to maximize the distance between them and the rest of the populace.

The problems on campus life today are not about free speech. They are about how the students have absolutely nothing to do with their lives but sit and listen to lectures, find the best parties to attend, and otherwise discover first-world problems to stew about and protest. That's the root of the problem. This is not a commercial environment where people are incentivized to find value in each other. Campuses have become completely artificial 4-year holding tanks for infantilized kids with zero experience in actual life in which people find ways to get along. These students are not serving each other in a market exchange, and very few have worked at day in their lives, so their default is to find some offense and protest. It's all they've been taught to do and all they know how to do. Idle hands and parents' money = trouble.

When you work hard in a job that suits your living standards, never greed for fortune because you will distract yourself from fulfilling other important priorities and participating in leisure activities in your current life. You will eventually gain the fortune if you set up a wise investment goal by having pride and confidence on your savings.

The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist

Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before.

Sometime I'm going to do an essay called 'The Virtues of Amateurism' for all of those people who wish they earned their living in the arts. The market kills more artistic people than anything else. It's a world of safety out there, for most people. They want safety, the magazines and manufacturers give them safety, give them homogeneity, give them the familiar and comfortable, don't challenge them.

If there are still honest-smart men and women within those old and noble traditions, they should think carefully, observe and diagnose the illness. They should face the contradiction. Discuss the conflation. And then do as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and many others have done. Choose the miracle of creative competition over an idolatry of cash.They should stand up..

Recognizing that the boundaries of the market are ambiguous and cannot be determined in an objective way lets us realize that economics is not a science like physics or chemistry, but a political exercise... If the boundaries of what you are studying cannot be scientifically determined, what you are doing is not a science.

The energy and daring is to resist the noes, until the final yes has been achieved.

The economist may attempt to ignore psychology, but it is sheer impossibility for him to ignore human nature … If the economist borrows his conception of man from the psychologist his constructive work may have some chance of remaining purely economic in character. But if he does not, he will not thereby avoid psychology. Rather, he will force himself to make his own, and it will be bad psychology.

Their conversation ceased abruptly with the entry of an oddly-shaped man whose body resembled a certain vegetable. He was a thickset fellow with calloused and jaundiced skin and a patch of brown hair, a frizzy upheaval. We will call him Bell Pepper. Bell Pepper sidled up beside The Drippy Man and looked at the grilled cheese in his hand. The Drippy Man, a bit uncomfortable at the heaviness of the gaze, politely apologized and asked Bell Pepper if he would like one. “Why is one of your legs fatter than the other?” asked Bell Pepper. The Drippy Man realized Bell Pepper was not looking at his sandwich but towards the inconsistency of his leg sizes. “You always get your kicks pointing out defects?” retorted The Drippy Man. “Just curious. Never seen anything like it before.” “I was raised not to feel shame and hide my legs in baggy pants.” “So you flaunt your deformity by wearing short shorts?” “Like you flaunt your pockmarks by not wearing a mask?” Bell Pepper backed away, kicking wide the screen door, making an exit to a porch over hanging a dune of sand that curved into a jagged upward jab of rock. “He is quite sensitive,” commented The Dry Advisor. “Who is he?” “A fellow who once manipulated the money in your wallet but now curses the fellow who does.

It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man's use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it.

To summarize, using money to motivate people can be a double-edged sword. For tasks that require cognitive ability, low to moderate performance-based incentives can help. But when the incentive level is very high, it can command too much attention and thereby distract the person’s mind with thoughts about the reward. This can create stress and ultimately reduce the level of performance.

Information transforms and command the keys to uncommon destiny in life.ight information, whether social spiritual or physical remains the hub of every outstanding accomplishment on earth today.

It's almost hard to imagine anything more undemocratic than the view that political officials should not debate American wars in public, but only express concerns 'privately with the administration.' That's just a small sliver of Johnson's radicalism: replacing Feingold in the Senate with Ron Johnson would be a civil liberties travesty analogous to the economic travesty from, say, replacing Bernie Sanders with Lloyd Blankfein.

America is the greatest engine of innovation that has ever existed, and it can't be duplicated anytime soon, because it is the product of a multitude of factors: extreme freedom of thought, an emphasis on independent thinking, a steady immigration of new minds, a risk-taking culture with no stigma attached to trying and failing, a noncorrupt bureaucracy, and financial markets and a venture capital system that are unrivaled at taking new ideas and turning them into global products.

Our faith in freedom does not rest on the foreseeable results in particular circumstances but on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than for the bad.

Reconciliation means that those who have been on the underside of history must see that there is a qualitative difference between repression and freedom. And for them, freedom translates into having a supply of clean water, having electricity on tap; being able to live in a decent home and have a good job; to be able to send your children to school and to have accessible health care. I mean, what's the point of having made this transition if the quality of life of these people is not enhanced and improved? If not, the vote is useless.'-archbishop Desmond Tutu, chair of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Committee, 2001

The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.

It is because every individual knows little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it.

Used to the conditions of a capitalistic environment, the average American takes it for granted that every year business makes something new and better accessible to him. Looking backward upon the years of his own life, he realizes that many implements that were totally unknown in the days of his youth and many others which at that time could be enjoyed only by a small minority are now standard equipment of almost every household. He is fully confident that this trend will prevail also in the future. He simply calls it the American way of life and does not give serious thought to the question of what made this continuous improvement in the supply of material goods possible.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

Socialism is not really an option in the material world. There can be no collective ownership of anything materially scarce. One or another faction will assert control in the name of society. Inevitably, the faction will be the most powerful in society -- that is, the state. This is why all attempts to create socialism in scarce goods or services devolve into totalitarian systems of top-down planning.

Socialism is an alternative to capitalism as potassium cyanide is an alternative to water.

Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at.

It's WW2 and there are wage controls in place. Instead of health care, companies decide to offer employees shoes. Having absorbed those costs, they later lobby for every company to be required to offer shoes. That calls forth regulation and monopolization of the shoe industry. Shoes are heavily subsidized. Every shoe must be approved. Producers must be domestic. They must adhere to a certain quality. They can't discriminate based on foot size or individual need. Prices rise, and some people lack shoes, so the Affordable Shoe Act forces everyone to buy into an official shoe plan or pay a fee. Here we have a perfect plan for making shoes egregiously expensive. The entire country would be consumed with the fear of being shoeless if they lose their job. The left wing calls for a single shoe provider to offer universal shoes and the right wing meekly suggests that shoe makers be permitted to sell across state lines.Meanwhile, libertarians suggest that we just forget the whole thing and let the market make and deliver shoes of every quality to anyone from anyone. Everyone screams that this is an insane and dangerous idea.

It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. Whenyou pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you paytoo little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing youbought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. Thecommon law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting alot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is wellto add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you willhave enough to pay for something better.

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.

As long as government has the power to regulate business, business will control government by funding the candidate that legislates in their favor. A free-market thwarts lobbying by taking the power that corporations seek away from government! The only sure way to prevent the rich from buying unfair government influence is to stop allowing government to use physical force against peaceful people. Whenever government is allowed to favor one group over another, the rich will always win, since they can "buy" more favors, overtly or covertly, than the poor.

I was quite depressed two weeks ago when I spent an afternoon at Brentano's Bookshop in New York and was looking at the kind of books most people read. Once you see that you lose all hope.

There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.

When I applied to graduate school many years ago, I wrote an essay expressing my puzzlement at how a country that could put a man on the moon could still have people sleeping on the streets. Part of that problem is political will; we could take a lot of people off the streets tomorrow if we made it a national priority. But I have also come to realize that NASA had it easy. Rockets conform to the unchanging laws of physics. We know where the moon will be at a given time; we know precisely how fast a spacecraft will enter or exist the earth's orbit. If we get the equations right, the rocket will land where it is supposed to--always. Human beings are more complex than that. A recovering drug addict does not behave as predictably as a rocket in orbit. We don't have a formula for persuading a sixteen-year-old not to drop out of school. But we do have a powerful tool: We know that people seek to make themselves better off, however they may define that. Our best hope for improving the human condition is to understand why we act the way we do and then plan accordingly. Programs, organizations, and systems work better when they get the incentives right. It is like rowing downstream.

These are tough times for state governments. Huge deficits loom almost everywhere, from California to New York, from New Jersey to Texas.Wait—Texas? Wasn't Texas supposed to be thriving even as the rest of America suffered? Didn't its governor declare, during his re-election campaign, that 'we have billions in surplus'? Yes, it was, and yes, he did. But reality has now intruded, in the form of a deficit expected to run as high as $25 billion over the next two years.And that reality has implications for the nation as a whole. For Texas is where the modern conservative theory of budgeting—the belief that you should never raise taxes under any circumstances, that you can always balance the budget by cutting wasteful spending—has been implemented most completely. If the theory can't make it there, it can't make it anywhere.

The media are desperately afraid of being accused of bias. And that's partly because there's a whole machine out there, an organized attempt to accuse them of bias whenever they say anything that the Right doesn't like. So rather than really try to report things objectively, they settle for being even-handed, which is not the same thing. One of my lines in a column—in which a number of people thought I was insulting them personally—was that if Bush said the Earth was flat, the mainstream media would have stories with the headline: 'Shape of Earth—Views Differ.' Then they'd quote some Democrats saying that it was round.

To me, the conclusion that the public has the ultimate responsibility for the behavior of even the biggest businesses is empowering and hopeful, rather than disappointing. My conclusion is not a moralistic one about who is right or wrong, admirable or selfish, a good guy or a bad guy. My conclusion is instead a prediction, based on what I have seen happening in the past. Businesses have changed when the public came to expect and require different behavior, to reward businesses for behavior that the public wanted, and to make things difficult for businesses practicing behaviors that the public didn't want. I predict that in the future, just as in the past, changes in public attitudes will be essential for changes in businesses' environmental practices.

The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads.

All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest. Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant.

It is true that some secluded intellectuals in their esoteric circles talk differently. They proclaim the priority of what they call eternal absolute values and feign in their declamations—not in their personal conduct—a disdain of things secular and transitory. But the public ignores such utterances. The main goal of present-day political action is to secure for the respective pressure group memberships the highest material well-being. The only way for a leader to succeed is to instill in people the conviction that his program best serves the attainment of this goal.

But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple.

State ownership! It leads only to absurd and monstrous conclusions; state ownership means state monopoly, concentrated in the hands of one party and its adherents, and that state brings only ruin and bankruptcy to all.

These people look upon inequality as upon an evil. They do not assert that a definitedegree of inequality which can be exactly determined by a judgment free of anyarbitrariness and personal evaluation is good and has to be preserved unconditionally.They, on the contrary, declare inequality in itself as bad and merely contend that alower degree of it is a lesser evil than a higher degree in the same sense in which asmaller quantity of poison in a man’s body is a lesser evil than a larger dose. But ifthis is so, then there is logically in their doctrine no point at which the endeavorstoward equalization would have to stop. Whether one has already reached a degree ofinequality which is to be considered low enough and beyond which it is not necessaryto embark upon further measures toward equalization is just a matter of personaljudgments of value, quite arbitrary, different with different people and changing in thepassing of time. As these champions of equalization appraise confiscation and“redistribution” as a policy harming only a minority, viz., those whom they considerto be “too” rich, and benefiting the rest—the majority—of the people, they cannotoppose any tenable argument to those who are asking for more of this allegedlybeneficial policy. As long as any degree of inequality is left, there will always bepeople whom envy impels to press for a continuation of the equalization policy.Nothing can be advanced against their inference: If inequality of wealth and incomesis an evil, there is no reason to acquiesce in any degree of it, however low;equalization must not stop before it has completely leveled all individuals’ wealth andincomes.

All varieties of the producers' policy are advocated on the ground of their alleged ability to raise the party members' standard of living. Protectionism and economic self-sufficiency, labor union pressure and compulsion, labor legislation, minimum wage rates, public spending, credit expansion, subsidies, and other makeshifts are always recommended by their advocates as the most suitable or the only means to increase the real income of the people for whose votes they canvass. Every contemporary statesman or politician invariably tells his voters: My program will make you as affluent as conditions may permit, while my adversaries' program will bring you want and misery.

The decline of geography in academia is easy to understand: we live in an age of ever-increasing specialization, and geography is a generalist's discipline. Imagine the poor geographer trying to explain to someone at a campus cocktail party (or even to an unsympathetic adminitrator) exactly what it is he or she studies. "Geography is Greek for 'writing about the earth.' We study the Earth.""Right, like geologists.""Well, yes, but we're interested in the whole world, not just the rocky bits. Geographers also study oceans, lakes, the water cycle...""So, it's like oceanography or hydrology.""And the atmosphere.""Meteorology, climatology...""It's broader than just physical geography. We're also interested in how humans relate to their planet.""How is that different from ecology or environmental science?""Well, it encompasses them. Aspects of them. But we also study the social and economic and cultural and geopolitical sides of--""Sociology, economics, cultural studies, poli sci.""Some geographers specialize in different world regions.""Ah, right, we have Asian and African and Latin American studies programs here. But I didn't know they were part of the geography department.""They're not."(Long pause.)"So, uh, what is it that do study then?

When Republicans recently charged the President with promoting 'class warfare,' he answered it was 'just math.' But it's more than math. It's a matter of morality.Republicans have posed the deepest moral question of any society: whether we're all in it together. Their answer is we're not.President Obama should proclaim, loudly and clearly, we are.

Inequality of wealth and incomes is an essential feature of the market economy. It is the implement that makes the consumers supreme in giving them the power to force all those engaged in production to comply with their orders. It forces all those engaged in production to the utmost exertion in the service of the consumers. It makes competition work. He who best serves the consumers profits most and accumulatesriches.

Without exception all political parties promise their supporters a higher real income. There is no difference in this respect between nationalists and internationalists and between the supporters of a market economy and the advocates of either socialism or interventionism. If a party asks its supporters to make sacrifices for its cause, it always explains these sacrifices as the necessary temporary means for the attainment of the ultimate goal, the improvement of the material well-being of its members. Each party considers it as an insidious plot against its prestige and its survival if somebody ventures to question the capacity of its projects to make the group members more prosperous. Each party regards with a deadly hatred the economists embarking upon such a critique.

I do not intend to defend capitalism or capitalists. They, like everything human, have their defects. I only say their possibilities of usefulness are not ended.Capitalism has borne the monstrous burden of the war and today still has the strength to shoulder the burdens of peace. ... It is not simply and solely an accumulation of wealth, it is an elaboration, a selection, a co-ordination of values which is the work of centuries. ... Many think, and I myself am one of them, that capitalism is scarcely at the beginning of its story.

There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term 'conservatism' can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of a powerful, lawless, aggressive and violent state, a welfare state for the rich dedicated to a lunatic form of Keynesian economic intervention that enhances state and private power while mortgaging the country's future.

Social security isn’t a ponzi scheme. It’s not bankrupting us. It’s not an outrage. It is working.

The rich control our politics to a huge extend. In return they get tax cuts and deregulation. It's been and is an amazing ride for the rich.

The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that.

People must learn that the accumulation of wealth by the successfulconduct of business is the corollary of the improvement of their own standard ofliving and vice versa. They must realize that bigness in business is not an evil, but both the cause and effect of the fact that they themselves enjoy all those amenitieswhose enjoyment is called the “American way of life.

In the market economy the consumers are supreme. Consumers determine, by theirbuying or abstention from buying, what should be produced, by whom and how, ofwhat quality and in what quantity. The entrepreneurs, capitalists, and landowners whofail to satisfy in the best possible and cheapest way the most urgent of the not yetsatisfied wishes of the consumers are forced to go out of business and forfeit theirpreferred position. In business offices and in laboratories the keenest minds are busyfructifying the most complex achievements of scientific research for the production ofever better implements and gadgets for people who have no inkling of the scientifictheories that make the fabrication of such things possible. The bigger an enterprise is,the more it is forced to adjust its production activities to the changing whims andfancies of the masses, its masters. The fundamental principle of capitalism is massproduction to supply the masses. It is the patronage of the masses that makesenterprises grow into bigness. The common man is supreme in the market economy.He is the customer “who is always right.

The social function of economic science consists precisely in developing soundeconomic theories and in exploding the fallacies of vicious reasoning. In the pursuit ofthis task the economist incurs the deadly enmity of all mountebanks and charlatanswhose shortcuts to an earthly paradise he debunks. The less these quacks are able toadvance plausible objections to an economist’s argument, the more furiously do theyinsult them.

Economics is a political argument. It is not – and can never be – a science; there are no objective truths in economics that can be established independently of political, and frequently moral, judgements. Therefore, when faced with an economic argument, you must ask the age-old question ‘Cui bono?’ (Who benefits?), first made famous by the Roman statesman and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero.

The world I grew up in was a brutal one. The murder rate was once seven people for every hundred thousand. The average American on minimum wage could barely afford to keep themselves alive on canned food. Millions died over private oil fortunes. Wealthy men and women ran the world for profit. Fools and charlatans got into our Parliaments and set the world on fire. We had everything on paper - checks, balances, freedom, democracy - and yet to live was to be a slave.

Our minds become slaves to those we see as having total power to control us and to cause pain to us. We are quick to give up control of ourselves to those who have the power to rule us as long as they also have the power to feed us. This is the fundamental construct of a feudal society.

[Voltaire] theoretically prefers a republic, but he knows its flaws: it permits factions which, if they do not bring on civil war, at least destroy national unity; it is suited only to small states protected by geographic situation, and as yet unspoiled and untorn with wealth; in general "men are rarely worthy to govern themselves." Republics are transient at best; they are the first form of society, arising from the union of families; the American Indians lived in tribal republics, and Africa is full of such democracies. but differentiation of economic status puts an end to these egalitarian governments; and differentiation is the inevitable accompaniment of development.

I have heard that all ideas of equality are visionary—that they can never be realized—and I believe it. But surely, though there must be hewers of wood, and drawers of water, they ought to have the absolute necessaries of life.

What nature hath joined together, multiple regression analysis cannot put asunder.

Clearly, only very unequal intellectual and moral standing could justify having equality imposed, whether the people want it or not, as Dworkin suggests, and only very unequal power would make it possible.

Government succeeds by failing.

At a conservative estimate, there are probably a million men and women in their twenties and thirties who would happily work long hours doing what most needs to be done, if they were paid something for it.

Therefore it is not arrogance or narrow-mindedness that leads the economist to discuss these things from the standpoint of economics. No one, who is not able to form an independent opinion about the admittedly difficult and highly technical problem of calculation in the socialist economy, should take sides in the question of socialism versus capitalism. No one should speak about interventionism who has not examined the economic consequences of interventionism. An end should be put to the common practice of discussing these problems from the standpoint of the prevailing errors, fallacies, and prejudices. It might be more entertaining to avoid the real issues and merely to use popular catchwords and emotional slogans. But politics is a serious matter. Those who do not want to think its problems through to the end should keep away from it.

The ICC [Interstate Commerce Commission] illustrates what might be called the natural history of government intervention. A real or fancied evil leads to demands to do something about it. A political coalition forms consisting of sincere, high-minded reformers and equally sincere interested parties. The incompatible objectives of the members of the coalition (e.g., low prices to consumers and high prices to producers) are glossed over by fine rhetoric about “the public interest,” “fair competition,” and the like. The coalition succeeds in getting Congress (or a state legislature) to pass a law. The preamble to the law pays lip service to the rhetoric and the body of the law grants power to government officials to “do something.” The high-minded reformers experience a glow of triumph and turn their attention to new causes. The interested parties go to work to make sure that the power is used for their benefit. They generally succeed. Success breeds its problems, which are met by broadening the scope of intervention. Bureaucracy takes its toll so that even the initial special interests no longer benefit. In the end the effects are precisely the opposite of the objectives of the reformers and generally do not even achieve the objectives of the special interests. Yet the activity is so firmly established and so many vested interests are connected with it that repeal of the initial legislation is nearly inconceivable. Instead, new government legislation is called for to cope with the problems produced by the earlier legislation and a new cycle begins.

What should have died along with communism is the belief that modern societies can be run on a single principle, whether that of planning under the general will or that of free-market allocations.

It takes a pillage.

Europe, it is true, is a geographical and, within certain limits, an historical cultural conception. But the idea of Europe as an economic unit contradicts capitalist development in two ways. First of all there exist within Europe among the capitalist States – and will so long as these exist – the most violent struggles of competition and antagonisms, and secondly the European States can no longer get along economically without the non-European countries. ... At the present stage of development of the world market and of world economy, the conception of Europe as an isolated economic unit is a sterile concoction of the brain. ...And if the idea of a European union in the economic sense has long been outstripped, this is no less the case in the political sense.....Only were one suddenly to lose sight of all these happenings and manoeuvres, and to transfer oneself back to the blissful times of the European concert of powers, could one say, for instance, that for forty years we have had uninterrupted peace. This conception, which considers only events on the European continent, does not notice that the very reason why we have had no war in Europe for decades is the fact that international antagonisms have grown infinitely beyond the narrow confines of the European continent, and that European problems and interests are now fought out on the world seas and in the by-corners of Europe.

Anyone who objects to any government whatsoever as a form of socialism ought not to pull that socialist lever in their home, the one that makes their waste disappear in a whirlpool into the socialized sewage treatment plant.

Considering what is at stake politically, economically and technically for most organizations; usually justifying IT governance deployment based on one viewpoint narrows suitability and expected benefits.

One simple answer is that there has been a massive rise in the incidence of sanctimony and smugness among the successful that has nothing to do with any change in the underlying reality. Rather, it has been stimulated by politicians who have realized that it is possible to win power by recruiting the most economically successful forty per cent or so of the population in a crusade to roll back the gains made by their fellow citizens in the previous forty years. And how better to rationalize this than to tell people that they deserve the incomes that the market generates?

What these men represented was not 'The West' but what was for this century a relatively new kind of monied class in America, a group devoid of social responsibilities because their ties to any one place had been so attenuated.

In 1980 candidate Reagan asked whether we were better off than we had been 4 years earlier. In 1992 we will be asked whether we expect our children to live better than we do.

...poor countries are poor because those who have power make choices that create poverty. They get it wrong not by mistake or ignorance but on purpose. To understand this, you have to go beyond economics and expert advice on the best thing to do and, instead, study how decisions actually get made, who gets to make them, and why those people decide to do what they do.

We need not be surprised at this. On a wrong road, inconsistency is inevitable; if it were not so, mankind would be sacrificed. A false principle never has been, and never will be, carried out to the end.

Both political parties have moved to the right during the neoliberal period. Today’s New Democrats are pretty much what used to be called “moderate Republicans.” The “political revolution” that Bernie Sanders called for, rightly, would not have greatly surprised Dwight Eisenhower.The fate of the minimum wage illustrates what has been happening. Through the periods of high and egalitarian growth in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the minimum wage—which sets a floor for other wages—tracked productivity. That ended with the onset of neoliberal doctrine. Since then, the minimum wage has stagnated (in real value). Had it continued as before, it would probably be close to $20 per hour. Today, it is considered a political revolution to raise it to $15.

[Conventional wisdom] very heavily tends to reflect the preferences and the interests of the elite.

Rather than street crime, I argue that a better analogy is to voting. Having a high opportunity cost of time—resulting, say, from a high-paying job and a good education—should discourage people from voting, yet it is precisely those with a high opportunity cost of time who tend to vote. Why? Because they care about influencing the outcome and consider themselves sufficiently well informed to want to express their opinions. Terrorists also care about influencing political outcomes. Instead of asking who has a low salary and few opportunities, to understand what makes a terrorist we should ask: Who holds strong political views and is confident enough to try to impose their extremist vision by violent means? Most terrorists are not so desperately poor that they have nothing to live for. Instead they are people who care so deeply and fervently about a cause that they are willing to die for it.

There are only two problems in my life. The political ones are insoluble and the economic ones are incomprehensible.

So spoke the man whose importance originated in the golden harvest he had reaped with the resistless hand of force, from the the legal, but unfortunate possessors, in a far distant region, where the conviction of riches proves certain destruction to the hapless natives, and poverty is considered as the greatest crime their European plunderers can possibly be accused of.

A woman's income appeal is a bell-shaped curve: men do not want to date low-earning women, but once a woman starts earning too much, they seem to be scared off.

I sometimes refer to economics as a woman. To me the subject was always a she. People would ask me why. Easy. She's obviously a woman: all the men are trying to do her, and mostly they're failing.

I see entrepreneurship, like many other activities, as a type of mission. A mission by which we can provide better life chances and quality for both our current and future generations.

An artist that makes art merely to meet a demand is a slave to what his patrons wants to see, or, hear.

Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.

The appeal to the intellectually insecure is also more important than it might seem. Because economics touches so much of life, everyone wants to have an opinion. Yet the kind of economics covered in the textbooks is a technical subject that many people find hard to follow. How reassuring, then, to be told that it is all irrelevant -- that all you really need to know are a few simple ideas! Quite a few supply-siders have created for themselves a wonderful alternative intellectual history in which John Maynard Keynes was a fraud, Paul Samuelson and even Milton Friedman are fools, and the true line of deep economic thought runs from Adam Smith through obscure turn-of-the-century Austrians straight to them.

The capital amassed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through various forms of slave economy is still in circulation, said De Jong, still bearing interest, increasing many times over and continually burgeoning anew.

Terry took the silence as acquiescence, “The other way to make money is to exploit people, oh, no sorry, that’s the ‘only’ way to make money, exploit other people, that’s how the billionaires have acquired all their money by exploiting others… So how did they achieve it? You’re going to love this… they changed all the rules to accommodate what they wanted to do. How I hear you ask… easy, they own the politicians, they own the banks, they own industry and they own everything. They made it easier for themselves to invest in so called emerging markets. What once would’ve been considered treasonous was now considered virtuous. Instead of building up the nation state and its resources, all of its resources, including its people, they concentrated on building up their profits. That’s all they did. They invested in parts of the world where children could be worked for 12 hours a day 7 days a week, where grown men and women could be treated like slaves and all for a pittance and they did this because we here in the west had made it illegal to work children, because we’d abolished slavery, because we had fought for workers’ rights, for a minimum wage, for a 40 hr week, for pensions, for the right to retire, for a free NHS, for free education, all of these things were getting in the way of them making a quick and easy profit and worse …had been making us feel we were worth something.

The United States of America was a pirate nation for the first one hundred years of its existence, ripping off the patents and trademarks of the imperial European powers it had liberated itself from by blood. By keeping their GDP at home, the U.S. revolutionaries were able to bootstrap their nation into an industrial powerhouse. Now, it seems, their descendants are bent on ensuring that no other country can pull the same trick off.

In the second place, however, history is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant — the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed. Thus history has proceeded hitherto in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that the wills of individuals — each of whom desires what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external, in the last resort economic, circumstances (either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general) — do not attain what they want, but are merged into an aggregate mean, a common resultant, it must not be concluded that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this extent included in it.

We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.

Because of the collapsing economy of America, it is nearly a mathematical certainty that this ship will soon flounder.

Three things are neededFor humanity to co-exist:Truth, peace and basic needs.Everything else -Is irrelevant.

For example, the supporters of tariffs treat it as self-evident that the creation of jobs is a desirable end, in and of itself, regardless of what the persons employed do. That is clearly wrong. If all we want are jobs, we can create any number--for example, have people dig holes and then fill them up again, or perform other useless tasks. Work is sometimes its own reward. Mostly, however, it is the price we pay to get the things we want. Our real objective is not just jobs but productive jobs--jobs that will mean more goods and services to consume.

The ideal-worker standard and norm of work devotion push mothers to the margins of economic life. And a society that marginalizes its mothers impoverishes its children. That is why the paradigmatic poor family in the United States is a single mother and her child.

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?

As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can't kill someone and trade with him too.

Our attitude to these criticisms must be determined by our whole moral and emotional reaction to the future of international relations and the Peace of the World.

The war has ended with every one owing every one else immense sums of money. Germany owes a large sum to the Allies, the Allies owe a large sum to Great Britain, and Great Britain owes a large sum to the United States. The holders of war loan in every country are owed a large sum by the States, and the States in its turn is owed a large sum by these and other taxpayers. The whole position is in the highest degree artificial, misleading, and vexatious. We shall never be able to move again, unless we can free our limbs from these paper shackles.

Money can cloud your vision. Sometimes, God takes away the money and uses times of adversity to refine us like gold.

In regards to the price of commodities, the rise of wages operates as simple interest does, the rise of profit operates like compound interest. Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.

The ideas of debtor and creditor as to what constitutes a good time never coincide.

Your money myth affects your gain and luck.In economics, illusion of money affects wealth.

NAUGHTY AND NICE? said Death. BUT IT'S EASY TO BE NICE IF YOU'RE RICH. IS THIS FAIR?Albert wanted to argue. He wanted to say, Really? In that case, how come so many of the rich buggers is bastards? And being poor don't mean being naughty, neither.

Money can only be used to buy man-made goods.

I was reading in the paper today that Congress wants to replace the dollar bill with a coin. They’ve already done it. It’s called a nickel.

When a country has substituted credit money or fiat money for metallic money, because the legal equating of the over-issued paper and the metallic money sets in motion the mechanism described by Gresham's Law, it is often asserted that the balance of payments determines the rate of exchange. But this also is a quite inadequate explanation. The rate of exchange is determined by the purchasing power possessed by a unit of each kind of money.

One variety of the balance-of-payments theory attempts to distinguish between the importation of necessaries and the importation of articles that can be dispensed with. Necessaries, it is said, have to be bought whatever their price is, simply because they cannot be done without. Consequently there must be a continual depreciation in the currency of a country that is obliged to import necessaries from abroad and itself is able to export only relatively dispensable articles. To argue thus is to forget that the greater or less necessity or dispensability of individual goods is fully expressed in the intensity and extent of the demand for them in themarket,and thus in the amount of money which is paid for them. However strong the desire of the Austrians for foreign bread, meat, coal, or sugar, may be, they can only get these things if they are able to pay for them.

...If you look at mainstream economics there are three things you will not find in a mainstream economic model - Banks, Debt, and Money. How anybody can think they can analyze capital while leaving out Banks, Debt, and Money is a bit to me like an ornithologist trying to work out how a bird flies whilst ignoring that the bird has wings...

The rule of money is it must be earned.

An attempt is sometimes made to demonstrate the desirability of measures directed against speculation by reference to the fact that there are times when there is nobody in opposition to the bears in the foreign-exchange market so that they alone are able to determine the rate of exchange. That, of course, is not correct. Yet it must be noticed that speculation has a peculiar effect in the case of a currency whose progressive depreciation is to be expected while it is impossible to foresee when the depreciation will stop, if at all. While, in general, speculation reduces the gap between the highest and lowest prices without altering the average price-level, here, where the movement will presumably continue in the same direction, this naturally can not be the case. The effect of speculation here is to permit the fluctuation, which would otherwise proceed more uniformly, to proceed by fits and starts with the interposition of pauses.

Any intervention, such as that of the German Reichsbank in the Spring of 1923, in which only a small part of the increasing note-expansion was recovered by the banks through the sale of foreign bills, would necessarily be unsuccessful. Led by the idea of opposing speculation, inflationistic governments have allowed themselves to become involved in measures whose meaning is hardly intelligible. Thus at one time the importation of notes, then their exportation, then again both their exportation and importation, have been prohibited. Exporters have been forbidden to sell for their own country's notes, importers to buy with them.

But there are nevertheless three conclusions that seem to follow from our critical examination of the possibilities of inflationary policy. In the first place, all the aims of inflationism can be secured by other sorts of intervention in economic affairs, and secured better, and without undesirable incidental effects. If it is desired to relieve debtors, moratoria may be declared or the obligation to repay loans may be removed altogether; if it is desired to encourage exportation, export premiums may be granted; if it is desired to render importation more difficult, simple prohibition may be resorted to, or import duties levied. All these measures permit discrimination between classes of people, branches of production, and districts, and this is impossible for an inflationary policy. Inflation benefits all debtors, including the rich, and injures all creditors, including the poor; adjustment of the burden of debts by special legislation allows of differentiation. Inflation encourages the exportation of all commodities and hinders all importation; premiums, duties, and prohibitions can be employed discriminatorily.

That policy which aims at raising the objective exchange-value of money is called, after the most important means at its disposal, restrictionism or deflationism. This nomenclature does not really embrace all the policies that aim at an increase in the value of money. The aim of restrictionism may also be attained by not increasing the quantity of money when the demand for it increases, or by not increasing it enough. This method has quite often been adopted as a way of increasing the value of money in face of the problems of a depreciated credit-money standard.

Restrictionism, however, demands positive sacrifices from the national exchequer when it is carried out by the withdrawal of notes from circulation (say through the issue of interest-bearing bonds or through taxation) and their cancellation.The unpopularity of restrictionism has other causes as well. Attempts to raise the objective exchange-value of money, in the circumstances that have existed, have necessarily been limited either to single States or to a few States and at the best have had only a very small prospect of simultaneous realization throughout the whole world. Now as soon as a single country or a few countries go over to a money with a rising purchasing power, while the other countries retain a money with a falling or stationary exchange-value, or one which although it may be rising in value is not rising to the same extent, then, as has been demonstrated above, the conditions of international trade are modified. In the country whose money is rising in value, exportation becomes more difficult and importation easier.

Restrictionistic ideas have never met with any measure of popular sympathy except after a time of monetary depreciation when it has been necessary to decide what should take the place of the abandoned inflationary policy.

When the value of money is increased, then those are enriched who at the time possess credit money or claims to credit money. Their enrichment must be paid for by debtors, among them the State (i.e., the tax-payers). Yet those who are enriched by the increase in the value of money are not the same as those who were injured by the depreciation of money in the course of the inflation; and those who must bear the cost of the policy of raising the value of money are not the same as those who benefited by its depreciation. To carry out a deflationary policy is not to do away with the consequences of inflation. You cannot make good an old breach of the law by committing a new one.

A metallic money, the augmentation or diminution of the quantity of metal available for which is independent of deliberate human intervention, is becoming the modern monetary ideal. The significance of adherence to a metallic-money system lies in the freedom of the value of money from State influence that such a system guarantees.

The State does not govern the market; in the market in which products are exchanged it may quite possibly be a powerful party, but nevertheless it is only one party of many, nothing more than that. All its attempts to transform the exchange-ratios between economic goods that are determined in the market can only be undertaken with the instruments of the market.

Etatism, as a theory, is the doctrine of the omnipotence of the State, and, as a policy, the attempt to regulate all mundane affairs by authoritative commandment and prohibition. The ideal society of etatism is a particular sort of socialistic community; it is usual in discussions involving this ideal society to speak of State Socialism, or, in some connexions, of Christian Socialism.

Etatism by no means aims at the formal transformation of all ownership of the means of production into State ownership by a complete overthrow of the established legal system. Only the biggest industrial, mining, and transport enterprises are to be nationalized; in agriculture, and in medium- and small-scale industry, private property is nominally to continue. Nevertheless, all enterprises are to become State undertakings in fact. Owners are to be left the title and dignity of ownership, it is true, and to be given a right to the receipt of a 'reasonable' income, 'in accordance with their position'; but, in fact, every business is to be changed into a government office and every livelihood into an official profession.

There is no room at all for independent enterprise under any variety of State Socialism. Prices are to be regulated authoritatively; authority is to fix what is to be produced, and how, and in what quantities. There is to be no speculation, no 'excessive' profit, no loss. There is to be no innovation unless it be decreed by authority. The official is to direct and supervise everything.

Every word of etatistic thought is contradicted by the doctrines of sociology and economics; this is why etatists endeavour to prove that these sciences do not exist. In their opinion, social affairs are shaped by the State. To the law, all things are possible; and there is no sphere in which State intervention is not omnipotent.

That the social life of human beings is subject to definite limitations; that it is governed by a set of laws that are comparable with those of Nature; these are notions that are unknown to the etatist. For the etatist, everything is a question of Macht - power, force, might. And his conception of Macht is crudely materialistic.

History likewise shows that sometimes the 'monetary standard of the victors' can prove to be very bad. There have seldom been more brilliant victories than those eventually achieved by the American insurgents under Washington against the English troops. But the American 'continental" dollar did not benefit from them. The more proudly the star-spangled banner rose on high, the lower did the exchange-rate fall, until, at the very moment when the victory of the rebels was secured, the dollar became entirely valueless. The course of events was no different not long afterwards in France. In spite of the victories of the revolutionary army, the metal premium rose.

For the etatist, money is a creature of the State, and the esteem in which money is held is the economic expression of the respect or prestige enjoyed by the State. The more powerful and the richer the State, the better its money. Thus, during the War, it was asserted that 'the monetary standard of the victors' would ultimately be the best money. Yet victory and defeat on the battlefield can exercise only an indirect influence on the value of money.

Neither has the wealth of a country any bearing on the valuation of its money. Nothing is more erroneous than the widespread habit of regarding the monetary standard as something in the nature of the shares of the State or the community.Such observers fail to recognize that the valuation of the rnonetary unit does not depend upon the wealth of the country, but upon the ratio between the quantity of money and the demand for it, so that even the richest country may have a bad currency and the poorest country a good one.

The oldest and most popular instrument of etatistic monetary policy is the official fixing of maximum prices. High prices, thinks the etatist, are not a consequence of an increase in the quantity of money, but a consequence of reprehensible activity on the part of 'bulls' and 'profiteers'; it will suffice to suppress their machinations in order to ensure the cessation of the rise of prices. Thus it is made a punishable offence to demand, or even to pay, 'excessive' prices.

Let us merely discuss the question, what consequences would necessarily follow if, ceteris paribus, with an increasing quantity of money, prices were restricted to the old level by official compulsion? An increase in the quantity of money leads to the appearance in the market of new desire to purchase, which had previously not existed; 'new purchasing power', it is usual to say, has been created. If the new would-be purchasers compete with those that are already in the market, then, so long as it is not permissible to raise prices, only part of the total purchasing power can be exercised.

The attempt to restrain prices within limits has to be given up. A government that sets out to abolish market prices is inevitably driven towards the abolition of private property.

For once the commodities have been sold that were already on the market when their price was authoritatively fixed at a level below that demanded by the situation of the market, then the emptied store-rooms are not filled again. Charging more than a certain price is prohibited, but producing and selling has not been made compulsory. There are no longer any sellers. The market ceases to function. But this means that economic organization based on division of labour becomes impossible. The level of money-prices cannot be fixed without overthrowing the system of social division of labour.

The government desires to purchase; it desires to use the market, not to disorganize it. But the officially-fixed price does disorganize the market in which commodities and services are bought and sold for money. Commerce, so far as it is able, seeks relief in other ways. It re-develops a system of direct exchange, in which commodities and services are exchanged without the instrumentality of money. Those who are forced to dispose of commodities and services at the fixed prices do not dispose of them to everybody, but merely to those to whom they wish to do a favour. Would-be purchasers wait in long queues in order to snap up what they can get before it is too late; they race breathlessly from shop to shop, hoping to find one that is not yet sold out.

They did not suffer shipwreck because the entrepreneurs were not public-spirited, as the socialist-etatistic legend has it. They were bound to fail because the economic organization based upon division of labour and private property in the means of production can function only so long as price-determination in the market is free.

The agents of etatism have certainly not been lacking in zeal and energy. But, for all this, economic affairs cannot be kept going by magistrates and policemen.

All that the State need do, and can do, in order to preserve the monetary system undisturbed, is to refrain from such intervention. That is the essence of the monetary theory of the classical economists and their immediate successors, the Currency School. It is possible to refine and amplify this doctrine with the aid of the modern subjective theory; but it is impossible to overthrow it, and impossible to put anything else in its place. Those who are able to forget it only show that they are unable to think as economists.

According to the current view, the maintenance of sound monetary conditions is only possible with a 'credit balance of payments'.The confutation of this and related objections is implicit in the Quantity Theory and in Gresham's Law. The Quantity Theory shows that money can never permanently flow abroad from a country in which only metallic money is used (the 'purely metallic currency' of the Currency Principle). The tightness in the domestic market called forth by the efflux of part of the stock of money reduces the prices of commodities, and so restricts importation and encourages exportation, until there is once more enough money at home. The precious metals which perform the function of money are distributed among individuals, and consequently among separate countries, according to the extent and intensity of the demand of each for money. State intervention to assure to the community the necessary quantity of money by regulating its international nlovements is supererogatory.

It is not the poverty of individuals and the community, not indebtedness to foreign nations, not the unfavourableness of the conditions of production, that force up the rate of exchange, but inflation.

Speculation does not determine prices; it has to accept the prices that are determined in the market. I ts efforts are directed to correctly estimating future price-situations, and to acting accordingly. The influence of speculation cannot alter the average level of prices over a given period; what it can do is to diminish the gap between the highest and the lowest prices.

It is true that the speculator may happen to go astray in his estimate of future prices. What is usually overlooked in considering this possibility is that under the given conditions it is far beyond the capacities of most people to foresee the future any more correctly. If this were not so, the opposing group of buyers or sellers would have got the upper hand in the market. The fact that the opinion accepted by the market has later proved to be false is lamented by nobody with more genuine sorrow than by the speculators who held it. They do not err of malice prepense; after all, their object is to make profits, not losses.

But even though questions of currency policy are never more than questions of the value of money, they are sometimes disguised so that their true nature is hidden from the uninitiated. Public opinion is dominated by erroneous views on the nature of money and its value, and misunderstood slogans have to take the place of clear and precise ideas. The fine and complicated mechanism of the money and credit system is wrapped in obscurity, the proceedings on the Stock Exchange are a mystery, the function and significance of the banks elude interpretation. So it is not surprising that the arguments brought forward in the conflict of the different interests often missed the point altogether. Counsel was darkened with cryptic phrases whose meaning was probably hidden even from those who uttered them. Americans spoke of 'the dollar of our fathers' and Austrians of 'our dear old gulden note'; silver, the money of the common man, was set up against gold, the money of the aristocracy. Many a tribune of the people, in many a passionate discourse, sounded the loud praises of silver, which, hidden in deep mines, lay awaiting the time when it should come forth into the light of day to ransom miserable humanity, languishing in its wretchedness.

Inflationism is that monetary policy that seeks to increase the quantity of money.

What is thus improperly regarded as profit, instead of as part of capital, is consumed by the entrepreneur or passed on either to the consumer in the form of price-reductions that would not otherwise have been made or to the labourer in the form of higher wages, and the government proceeds to tax it as income or profits. In any case, consumption of capital results from the fact that monetary depreciation falsifies capital accounting.

If we disregard the exchange of present goods for future goods, and restrict our considerations for the time being to those cases in which the only exchanges are those between present goods and present money, we shall at once observe a fundamental difference between the effects of an isolated variation in a single commodity-price, emanating solely from the commodity side, and the effects of a variation in the exchange-ratio between money and other economic goods in general, emanating from the monetary side.

Where the currency depreciation is a result of government inflation carried out by the issue of notes, it is possible to avert its disastrous effect on economic calculation by conducting all bookkeeping in a stable money instead. But so far as the depreciation is a depreciation of gold, the world money, there is no such easy way out.

When the price of coal falls because production has increased while demand has remained unaltered, then, for example, those retailers are involved who have taken supplies from the wholesale dealers at the old higher price but are now able to dispose of them only at the new and lower price. But this alone will not account for all the social changes brought about by the increase of production of coal. The increase in the supply of coal will have improved the economic position of the community.

The social displacements that occur as consequences of variations in the value of money result solely from the circumstance that this assumption never holds good. In the chapter dealing with the determinants of the objective exchange-value of money it was shown that variations in the value of money always start from a given point and gradually spread out from this point through the whole community.

Every separate economic agent maintains a stock of money that corresponds to the extent and intensity with which he is able to express his demand for it in the market. If the objective exchange-value of all the stocks of money in the world could be instantaneously and in equal proportion increased or decreased, if all at once the money-prices of all goods and services could rise or fall uniformly, the relative wealth of individual economic agents would not be affected. Subsequent monetary calculation would be in larger or smaller figures; that is all.

The supplementary quantity of gold that streams from it into commerce goes at first to the owners of the mine and then by turns to those who have dealings with them. If we schematically divide the whole community into four groups, the mine-owners, the producers of luxury goods, the remaining producers, and the agriculturalists, the first two groups will be able to enjoy the benefits resulting from the reduction in the value of money, the former of them to a greater extent than the latter. But even as soon as we' reach the third group, the situation is altered. The profit obtained by this group as a result of the increased demands of the first two will already be offset to some. extent by the rise in the prices of luxury goods which will have experienced the full effect of the depreciation by the time it begins to affect other goods. Finally, for the fourth group, the whole process will result in nothing but loss.

Let us now leave the example of the isolated State and turn our attention to the international movements that arise from a fall in the value of money due to an increase in its amount. Here, again, the process is the same. There is no increase in the available stock of goods; only its distribution is altered. The country in which the new mines are situated and the countries that deal directly with it have their position bettered by the fact that they are still able to buy commodities from other countries at the old lower prices at a time when depreciation at home has already occurred. Those countries that are the last to be reached by the new stream of money are those which must ultimately bear the cost of the increased welfare of the other countries.

Paper money in time of war, the new notes will first go into the pockets of the war contractors. 'As a result, these persons' demands for certain articles will increase and so also the price and the sale of these articles, but especially in so far as they are luxury articles. Thus the position of the producers of these articles will be improved, their demand for other commodities will also increase, and thus the increase of prices and sales will go on, distributing itself over a constantly augmented number of articles, until at last it has reached them all.

As a rule, however, an increase in the value of money spreads only gradually. The first of those who have to content themselves with lower prices than before for the commodities they sell, while they still have to pay the old higher prices for the commodities they buy, are those who are injured by the increase in the value of money. Those, however, who are the last to have to reduce the prices of the commodities they sell, and have meanwhile been able to take advantage of the fall in the prices of other things, are those who profit by the change.

THE economic consequences of fluctuations in the objective exchange-value of money have such important bearings on the life of the community and of the individual that as soon as the State had abandoned the attempt to exploit for fiscal ends its authority in monetary matters, and as soon as the large-scale development of the modern economic community had enabled the State to exert a decisive influence on the kind of money chosen by the market, it was an obvious step to think of attaining certain socio-political aims by influencing these consequences in a systematic manner. Modern currency policy is something essentially new; it differs fundamentally from earlier State activity in the monetary sphere.

But when States did debase the coinage, it was always from purely fiscal motives. The government needed financial help, that was all; it was not concerned with questions of currency policy.

It has been proposed that monetary liabilities should be settled in terms of gold and not according to their nominal amount. If this proposal were adopted, for each mark that had been borrowed that sum would have to be repaid that could at the time of repayment buy the same weight of gold as one mark could at the time when the debt contract was entered into. The fact that such proposals are now put forward and meet with approval shows that etatism has already lost its hold on the monetary system and that inflationary policies are inevitably approaching their end. Even only a few years ago, such a proposal would either have been ridiculed or else branded as high treason.

The entrepreneur who is reckoning in terms of a currency with a stable value is unable to compete with the entrepreneur who is prepared to make a quasi-gift of part of his capital to his customers. In 1920 and 1921, Dutch traders who had sold commodities to Austria could buy them back again after a while much cheaper than they had originally sold them, because the Austrian traders completely failed to see that they were selling them for less than they had cost.

Naive inflationism demands an increase in the quantity of money without suspecting that this will diminish the purchasing power of the money.

If the State uses this power systematically in order to force the community to accept a particular sort of money whose employment it desires for reasons of monetary policy, then it is actually carrying through a measure of monetary policy. The States which completed the transition to a gold standard a generation ago, did so from motives of monetary policy. They gave up the silver standard or the credit-money standard because they recognized that the behaviour of the value of silver or of credit money was unsuited to the economic policy they were following.

Fiat-money! Let the State 'create' money, and make the poor rich, and free them from the bonds of the capitalists! How foolish to forego the opportunity of making everybody rich, and consequently happy, that the State's right to create money gives it! How wrong to forego it simply because this would run counter to the interests of the rich! How wicked of the economists to assert that it is not within the power of the State to create wealth by means of the printing press!- You statesmen want to build railways, and complain of the low state of the exchequer? Well, then, do not beg loans from the capitalists and anxiously calculate whether your railways will bring in enough to enable you to pay interest and amortization on your debt. Create money, and help yourselves.

Other inflationists realize very well that an increase in the quantity of money reduces the purchasing power of the monetary unit. But they endeavour to secure inflation none-the-less, because of its effect on the value of money; they want depreciation, because they want to favour debtors at the expense of creditors and because they want to encourage exportation and make importation difficult.

Depreciation of money can benefit debtors only when it is unforeseen. If inflationary measures and a reduction of the value of money are expected, then those who lend money will demand higher interest in order to compensate their probable loss of capital, and those who seek loans will be prepared to pay the higher interest because they have a prospect of gaining on capital account.

A third group of inflationists do not deny that inflation involves serious disadvantages. Nevertheless, they think that there are higher and more important aims of economic policy than a sound monetary system. They hold that although inflation may be a great evil, yet it is not the greatest evil, and that the State might under certain circumstances find itself in a position where it would do well to oppose greater evils with the lesser evil of inflation.

This was the argument put forward during the War when the expenditure on the army and navy had to be met; and this was the argument put forward in Germany and Austria after the War when a part of the population had to be provided with cheap food, the losses on the operation of the railways and other public undertakings met, and reparations payments made. The assistance of inflation is invoked whenever a government is unwilling to increase taxation or unable to raise a loan; that is the truth of the matter.

Inflation made it possible to divert the fury of the people to 'speculators' and 'profiteers'. Thus it proved itself an excellent psychological resource of the destructive and annihilist war policy.

A government always finds itself obliged to resort to inflationary measures when it cannot negotiate loans and dare not levy taxes, because it has reason to fear that it will forfeit approval of the policy it is following if it reveals too soon the financial and general economic consequences of that policy. Thus inflation becomes the most important psychological resource of any economic policy whose consequences have to be concealed; and so in this sense it can be called an instrument of unpopular, i.e. of anti-democratic, policy, since by misleading public opinion it makes possible the continued existence of a system of government that would have no hope of the consent of the people if the circumstances were clearly laid before them. That is the political function of inflation. It explains why inflation has always been an important resource of policies of war and revolution and why we also find it in the service of socialism.

Big variations in the value of money give rise to the danger that commerce will emancipate itself from the money which is subject to State influence and choose a special money of its own. But without matters going so far as this it is still possible for all the consequences of variations in the value of money to be eliminated if the individuals engaged in economic activity clearly recognize that the purchasing power of money is constantly sinking and act accordingly. If in all business transactions they allow for what the objective exchange-value of money will probably be in the future, then all the effects on credit and commerce are finished with. In proportion as the Germans began to reckon in terms of gold, so was further depreciation rendered incapable of altering the relationship between creditor and debtor or even of influencing trade. By going over to reckoning in terms of gold, the community freed itself from the inflationary policy of the government. Thus it checkmated this inflationary policy, and eventually even the government was obliged to acknowledge gold as a basis of reckoning.

Consistently and uninterruptedly continued inflation must eventually lead to collapse. The purchasing power of money will fall lower and lower, until it eventually disappears altogether. It is true that an endless process of depredation can be imagined. We can imagine the purchasing power of money getting continually lower without ever disappearing altogether, and prices getting continually higher without it ever becoming impossible to obtain commodities in exchange for notes. Eventually this would lead to a situation in which even retail transactions were in terms of millions and billions and even higher figures; bu t the monetary system itself would remain. But such an imaginary state of affairs is hardly within the bounds of possibility. In the long run, a money which continually fell in value would have no commercial utility. It could not be used as a standard of deferred payments. For all transactions in which commodities or services were not exchanged for cash, another medium would have to be sought. In fact, a money that is continually depreciating becomes useless even for cash transactions. Everybody attempts to minimize his cash reserves, which are a source of continual loss.

It is the beginning of the 'demonetization' of the notes. The process is hastened by its panic-like character. It may be possible once, twice, perhaps even three or four times, to allay the fears of the public; but eventually the affair must run its course and then there is no longer any going back. Once the depreciation is proceeding so rapidly that sellers have to reckon with considerable losses even if they buy again as quickly as is possible, then the position of the currency is hopeless.

But it must be observed that as the depreciation of money proceeds, the demand for money (i.e. for the kind of money in question) gradually begins to fall. When loss of wealth is suffered in proportion to the length of time money is kept on hand, endeavours are made to reduce cash holdings as much as possible. N ow if every individual, even if his circumstances are otherwise unchanged, no longer wishes to maintain his cash holding at the same level as before the beginning of the inflation, the demand for money in the whole community, which can only be the sum of the individuals' demands, decreases too. There is also the additional fact that as commerce gradually-begins to use foreign money and actual gold in place of notes, individuals begin to hold part of their reserves in foreign money and in gold and no longer in notes.

The collapse of an inflation policy carried to its extreme -- as in the United States in 1781 and in France in 1796 -- does not destroy the monetary system, but only the credit money or fiat money of the State that has overestimated the effectiveness of its own policy. The collapse emancipates commerce from etatism and establishes metallic money again.

We have already examined one of the objections that have been brought against the Quantity Theory; the objection that it only holds good ceteris paribus. No more tenable as an objection against the determinateness of our conclusions is reference to the possibility that an additional quantity of money may be hoarded. This argument has played a prominent role in the history of monetary theory; it was one of the sharpest weapons in the armoury of the opponents of the Quantity Theory. Among the arguments of the opponents of the Currency Theory it immediately follows the proposition relating to the elasticity of cash-economizing methods of payment, to which it also bears a close relation as far as its content is concerned.

The sums of money collected in hoards lie there idle, waiting for the moment when commerce needs them for maintaining the stability of the objective exchange-value of money; and all those sums of money, that might threaten this stability when the demand for money decreases, flow back out of circulation into these hoards to slumber quietly until they are called forth again. This tacitly assumes ll the fundamental correctness of the arguments of the Quantity Theory, but asserts that there is nevertheless a principle inherent in the economic system that always prevents the working out of the processes that the Quantity Theory describes.In the first place, it must be recognized that from the economic point of view there is no such thing as money lying idle. All money, whether in reserves or literally in circulation (i.e. in process of changing hands at the very moment under consideration), is devoted in exactly the same way to the performance of a monetary function. The stock of money of the community is the sum of the stocks of individuals; there is no such thing as errant money.

What is called storing money is a way of using wealth. The uncertainty of the future makes it seem advisable to hold a larger or smaller part of one's possessions in a form that will facilitate a change from one way of using wealth to another, or transition from the ownership of one good to that of another, in order to preserve the opportunity of being able without difficulty to satisfy urgent demands that may possibly arise in the future for goods that will have to be obtained by way of exchange.

The doctrine of the importance of hoards for stabilizing the objective exchange-value of money has gradually lost its adherents with the passing of time. Nowadays its supporters are few.

Economic history shows us a continual increase in the demand for money. The characteristic feature of the development of the demand for money is its intensification; the growth of division of labour and consequently of exchange transactions, which have constantly become more and more indirect and dependent on the use of money, have helped to bring this about, as well as the increase of population and prosperity.

The aim was to regulate the value of money by increasing or diminishing the quantity of it. The effects of these measures appeared to provide an inductive proof of the correctness of this superficial version of the Quantity Theory, and incidentally concealed the weaknesses of its logic.

But here again it must be observed that this is a matter of a variation brought about through dynamic agencies. The static state, for which the contention attributed to the adherents of the mechanical version of the Quantity Theory would be valid, is disturbed by the fact that the exchange-ratios between individual commodities are necessarily modified. Under certain conditions, the technique of the market may have the effect of extending this modification to the exchange-ratio between money and other economic goods also.

Money is not indefinitely divisible. Even with the assistance of money-substitutes for expressing fractional sums that for technical reasons cannot conveniently be expressed in the actual monetary material (a method that has been brought to perfection in the modern system of token coinage), it seems entirely impossible to provide commerce with every desired fraction of the monetary unit.

The moneyprice of any commodity in any place, under the assumption of completely unrestricted exchange and disregarding the differences arising from the time taken in transit, must be the same as the price at any other place, augmented or diminished by the money-cost of transport.

We can easily imagine a monetary organization which, by the exclusive use of notes or clearing-house methods, allows all transfers to be made with the instrumentality of sums of money that never change their position in space.If differences due to the geographical position of money are disregarded in this way, we get the following law for the exchange-ratio between money and other economic goods: every economic good, that is ready for consumption (in the sense in which that phrase is usually understood in commerce and technology), has a subjective use-value qua consumption good at the place where it is and qua production good at those places to which it may be brought for consumption.

Local differences in the prices of commodities whose natures are technologically identical are to be explained on the one hand by differences in the cost of preparing them for consumption (expenses of transport, cost of retailing etc.) and on the other hand by the physical and legal obstacles that restrict the mobility of commodities and human beings.

Hence, the statement that the cost of living is different in different localities only means that the same individual cannot secure the same degree of satisfaction from the same stock of goods in different places.

To recapitulate: the exchange-ratio subsisting between commodities and money is everywhere the same. But men and their wants are not everywhere the same, and neither are commodities. Only if these distinctions are ignored is it possible to speak of local differences in the purchasing power of money or to say that living is dearer in one place than in another.

It is true that there are important differences between that money which plays the chief part in domestic trade, is the instrument of most exchanges, predominates in the dealings between consumers and sellers of consumption goods, and in loan transactions, and is recognized by the law as legal tender, and that money which is employed in relatively few transactions, is hardly ever used by consumers in their purchases, does not function as an instrument of loan operations, and is not legal tender. In popular opinion, the former money only is domestic money, the latter foreign money. Although we cannot accept this if we do not want to close the way to an understanding of the problem that occupies us, we must nevertheless emphasize that it has great significance in other connexions.

No individual and no nation need fear at any time to have less money than it needs. Government measures designed to regulate the international movement of money in order to ensure that the community shall have the amount it needs, are just as unnecessary and inappropriate as, say, intervention to ensure a sufficiency or corn or iron or the like. This argument dealt the Mercantilist Theory its death-blow.

Nevertheless statesmen are still greatly exercised by the problem of the international distribution of money. For hundreds of years, the Midas Theory, systematized by Mercantilism, has been the rule followed by governments in taking measures of commercial policy. In spite of Hume, Smith, and Ricardo, it still dominates men's minds more than would be expected. Phoenix-like, it rises again and again from its own ashes.

He who cares to go to the trouble of demonstrating the uselessness of index numbers for monetary theory and the concrete tasks of monetary policy will be able to select a good proportion of his weapons from the writings of the very men who invented them.

There are two parts to the problem of measuring the objective exchange-value of money. First we have to obtain numerical demonstration of the fact of variations in the objective exchange-value of money; then the question must be decided whether it is possible to make a quantitative examination of the causes of particular price movements, with special reference to the question whether it would be possible to produce.So far as the first-named problem is concerned, it is self-evident that its solution must assume the existence of a good, or complex of goods, of unchanging objective exchange-value. The fact that such goods are inconceivable needs no further elucidation.If the one is proved to be soluble, then so also is the other; and proof of the insolubility of the one is also proof of the insolubility of the other.

To measure is to determine the ratio of one quantity to another which is invariable or assumed to be invariable. Invariability in respect of the property to be measured, or at least the legitimacy of assuming such invariability, is a sine qua non of all measurement. Only when this assumption is admissible is it possible to determine the variations that are to be measured.

Under certain conditions, index numbers may do very useful service as an aid to investigation into the history and statistics of prices; for the extension of the theory of the nature and value of money they are unfortunately not very important.

All index-number systems, so far as they are intended to have a greater significance for monetary theory than that of mere playing with figures, are based upon the idea of measuring the utility of a certain quantity of money. The object is to determine whether a gramme of gold is more or less useful to-day than it was at a certain time in the past. As far as objective use-value is concerned, such an investigation may perhaps yield results. We may assume the fiction, if we like, that, say, a loaf of bread is always of the same utility in the objective sense, always comprises the same food value. It is not necessary for us to enter at all into the question of whether this is permissible or not.

Even if index numbers cannot fulfill the demands that theory has to make, they can still, in spite of their fundamental shortcomings and the inexactness of the methods by which they are actually determined, perform useful workaday services for the politician. If we have no other aim in view than the comparison of points of time that lie close to one another, then the errors that are involved in every method of calculating numbers may be so far ignored as to allow us to draw certain rough conclusions from them. Thus, for example, it becomes possible to a certain extent to span the temporal gap that lies, in a period of variation in the value of money, between movements of Stock Exchange rates and movements of the purchasing power that is expressed in the prices of commodities.

For hundreds, even thousands, of years, people completely failed to see that variations in the objective exchange-value of money could be induced by monetary factors. They tried to explain all variations of prices exclusively from the commodity side.

When individuals are exchanging present goods against future goods they do not take account in their valuations of Variations in the objective exchange-value of money. Lenders and borrowers are not in the habit of allowing for possible future fluctuations in the objective exchange-value of money.

The jurist is totally unacquainted with the problem of the value of money; he knows nothing of fluctuations in its exchange-value. The naive popular belief in the stability of the value of money has been admitted, with all its obscurity, into the law, and no great historical cause of large and sudden variations in the value of money has ever provided.

At one time, this gave rise to the question of whether the legal validity of the money was determined by the stamp of the ruler of the country or by the metal content of the coin; later, to the question of whether the command of the law or the free usage of business was to settle if the money was legal tender or not. The answer of public opinion, grounded on the principles of private property and the protection of acquired rights, ran the same in both cases: Prout quidque eontraetum est, ita et solvi debet; ut cum re eontraximus, re solvi debet, veluti cum mutuum dedimus, ut Tetro pecuniae tantundem solvi debeat.

So far as variations in the objective exchange-value of money are foreseen, they influence the terms of credit transactions. If a future fall in the purchasing power of the monetary unit has to be reckoned with, lenders must be prepared for the fact that the sum of money which a debtor repays at the conclusion of the transaction will have a smaller purchasing power than the sum originally lent. Lenders, in fact, would do better not to lend at all, but to buy other goods with their money. The contrary is true for debtors. If they buy commodities with the money they have borrowed and sell them again after a time, they will retain a surplus over and above the sum that they have to pay back. The credit transaction results in a gain for them. Consequently it is not difficult to understand that, so long as continued depreciation is to be reckoned with, those who lend money demand higher rates of interest and those who borrow money are willing to pay the higher rates. If, on the other hand, it is expected that the value of money will increase, then the rate of interest will be lower than it would otherwise have been.

When jurists and business men assert that the depreciation of money has a very great influence on all kinds of debt relations, that it makes all kinds of business more difficult, or even impossible, that it invariably leads to consequences that nobody desires and that everybody feels to be unjust, we naturally agree with them. In a social order that is entirely founded on the use of money and in which all accounting is done in terms of money, the destruction of the monetary system means nothing less than the destruction of the basis of all exchange. Nevertheless, this evil cannot be counteracted by ad hoc laws designed to remove the burden of the depreciation from single persons, or groups of persons, or classes of the community,

Globalization is a form of artificial intelligence.

Like casinos, large corporate entities have studied the numbers and the ways in which people respond to them. These are not con tricks - they're not even necessarily against our direct interests, although sometimes they can be - but they are hacks for the human mind, ways of manipulating us into particular decisions we otherwise might not make. They are also, in a way, deliberate underminings of the core principle of the free market, which derives its legitimacy from the idea that informed self-interest on aggregate sets appropriate prices for items. The key word is 'informed'; the point of behavioural economics - or rather, of its somewhat buccaneering corporate applications - is to skew our perception of the purchase to the advantage of the company. The overall consequence of that is to tilt the construction of our society away from what it should be if we were making the rational decisions classical economics imagines we would, and towards something else.

Small differences in a system of great power can have enormous consequences. [Source: Al Jazeera 'Upfront' interview]

A revolutionary war of freedom, he said” Hiawatha responded crisply, “and I agree… does Superman ever fly to Thailand and free the kids slaving in the sweat shops owned by the rich corporations? No, he doesn’t. Does Batman ever break into prison and free the wrongfully convicted and over sentenced black man whose rights were trampled on when he was incarcerated? No, he doesn’t. Does Spider man ever break into a house in suburbia and beat up the abusive and violent husband? No, he doesn’t.” “Do the Fantastic Four ever fly out to third world countries and defend the rights of the poor civilians against greedy American corporations? No, they don’t,” said the Pirate, not to be outdone. “They’re all just tools used by the state to maintain the status quo,” said Hiawatha.

Evening work is economical. Power comes most cheaply by night.

It turned out that capitalism alone could make people not only rich and happy but also poor, hungry, miserable, and powerless.

Since its appearance the view that prostitution is a product of capitalism has gained ground enormously. And as, in addition, preachers still complain that the good old morals have decayed, and accuse modern culture of having led to loose living, everyone is convinced that all sexual wrongs represent a symptom of decadence peculiar to our age.

Many find in sex and economics the meaning of life and the reason of it all. The consequence of this is that the goal of life for many has become a relief of tension.

Funny how in a material world full of pundits and economists obsessed with assets and liabilities -personally, economically and globally - few speak about the greatest of all these…YOU.

Feminists know that if women are paid equal wages for equal work, women will gain sexual as well as economic independence. But feminists have refused to face the fact that in a woman-hating social system, women will never be paid equal wages. Men in all their institutions of power are sustained by the sex labor and sexual subordination of women. The sex labor of women must be maintained; and systematic low wages for sex-neutral work effectively force women to sell sex to survive. The economic system that pays women lower wages than it pays men actually punishes women for working outside marriage or prostitution, since women work hard for low wages and still must sell sex. The economic system that punishes women for working outside the bedroom by paying low wages contributes significantly to women's perception that the sexual serving of men is a necessary part of any woman's life: or how else could she live? Feminists appear to think that equal pay for equal work is a simple reform, whereas it no reform at all; it is revolution. Feminists have refused to face the fact that equal pay for equal work is impossible as long as men rule women, and right-wing women have refused to forget it.

Extreme inequality and financial crisis usually coincide. But the elite who cause it usually come out OK. And they are usually man.

Whether women work in the care sector because the wages are low or whether wages are low because women work there is a question that cannot be answered. But we know that a big reason for economic inequality is that women to a much greater extent work with care.

Actually, the idea of economic man is an efficient way of excluding women. We have historically allocated women certain activities and said that she must do them because she is a woman. Then we create an economic theory that states that these activities have no economic meaning.

The laws of the solar system that previously only God had known could suddenly be read using scientific method. The view of the world changed. From one where God intervened, had opinions, smote, parted oceans, moved mountains and personally opened millions of flowers every day. To one where God was absent and the universe was a clock that he had created and wound up, but that now ticked of its own accord.

Two ideas are opposed — not concepts or abstractions, but Ideas which were in the blood of men before they were formulated by the minds of men. The Resurgence of Authority stands opposed to the Rule of Money; Order to Social Chaos, Hierarchy to Equality, socio-economico-political Stability to constant Flux; glad assumption of Duties to whining for Rights; Socialism to Capitalism, ethically, economically, politically; the Rebirth of Religion to Materialism; Fertility to Sterility; the spirit of Heroism to the spirit of Trade; the principle of Responsibility to Parliamentarism; the idea of Polarity of Man and Woman to Feminism; the idea of the individual task to the ideal of ‘happiness’; Discipline to Propaganda-compulsion; the higher unities of family, society, State to social atomism; Marriage to the Communistic ideal of free love; economic self-sufficiency to senseless trade as an end in itself; the inner imperative to Rationalism.

The Marxians love of democratic institutions was a stratagem only, a pious fraud for the deception of the masses. Within a socialist community there is no room left for freedom.

A society can be Pareto optimal and still perfectly disgusting.

This is a great trap of the twentieth century: on one side is the logic of the market, where we like to imagine we all start out as individuals who don't owe each other anything. On the other is the logic of the state, where we all begin with a debt we can never truly pay. We are constantly told that they are opposites, and that between them they contain the only real human possibilities. But it's a false dichotomy. States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would rec­ognize today.

Our market-intensive societies measure material progress by the increase in the volume and variety of commodities produced. And taking our cue from this sector, we measure social progress by the distribution of access to these commodities. Economics has been developed as propaganda for the takeover by large-scale commodity producers.

In the Middle Ages there was no salvation outside the Church, and the theologians had a hard time explaining what God did with those pagans who were visibly virtuous or saintly. Similarly, in contemporary society effort is not productive unless it is done at the behest of a boss, and economists have a hard time dealing with the obvious usefulness of people when they are outside the corporate control of a corporation, volunteer agency, or labour camp.

In an advanced industrial society it becomes almost impossible to seek, even to imagine, unemployment as a condition for autonomous, useful work. The infrastructure of society is arranged so that only the job gives access to the tools of production...Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very poor, or the very rich. A society that fosters intense dependence on commodities thus turns its unemployed into either its poor or its dependents.

There is not the slightest analogy between playing games and the conduct of business within a market society. The card player wins money by outsmarting his antagonist. The businessman makes money by supplying customers with goods they want to acquire.

There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain, and eagerness for the nearest good.

Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it. -Andrew Young, author, civil rights activist, US congressman, mayor, and UN ambassador (b. 1932)

The problem with gross domestic product is the gross bit. There are no deductions involved: all economic activity is accounted as if it were of positive value. Social harm is added to, not subtracted from, social good. A train crash which generates £1bn worth of track repairs, medical bills and funeral costs is deemed by this measure as beneficial as an uninterrupted service which generates £1bn in ticket sales.

If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them.

It [economics] facilitates our understanding of the well-being of societies and the challenges they face; it explains many of the daily interactions between individuals, companies and governments, and it offers a guide to understanding political and social trends that are shaping our world.

The dream of a planned, fair, moral, ethical, cash-free society remains strong, particularly among socialists and liberals. It clearly represents a fundamental human instinct. But feudalism just did not work very well, if only because powerful people will not always obey moral imperatives.

The bankers and financiers are badly overplaying their hands, again, and people are starting to catch on to the scam.Real wealth is tangible things produced with tangible effort. Loans made out of thin-air 'money' require no effort and are entirely ephemeral. But if those loans are used to acquire real ownership of real assets, then something has been exchanged for nothing and one party is getting screwed.

Free markets are the real people's revolution.

People above the line of bare subsistence in this age, and in all earlier ages, do not use the surplus which society has given them primarily for useful purposes. They do not seek to expand their lives, to live more wisely, intelligently, understandingly, but to impress other people with the fact that they have a surplus.

We should look closely on what is happening at the moment, guys with little moustaches can pop up everywhere now given this instable economic situation. A look into history shows us what that could mean.

It seems to be almost a law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative programme, on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off, than on any positive task. The contrast between the "we" and the "they", the common fight against those outside the group, seems to be an essential ingredient in any creed which will solidly knit together a group for common action. It is consequently always employed by those who seek, not merely support of a policy, but the unreserved allegiance of huge masses. From their point of view it has the great advantage of leaving them greater freedom of action than almost any positive programme.

The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they, or at least the best among them, have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognised before.

When people encounter the free market and they recoil or react negatively to it, they're merely confessing that voluntaryism, trade and negotiation are foreign and threatening to them, which tells you everything about how tragically they were raised.

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

As the war progresses, and as population increases to an even more intolerable level stretching resources to impossible lengths, the strong will begin fighting for their very survival. That’s what we’re seeing right now. Society will become more and more stratified into the people who aren’t buying the bullshit in society and those who blindly follow where they are led. Satanists, freethinkers, are a burgeoning minority cause. We have an illness that needs to be recognized just like alcoholism, handicaps, addictive behaviors and AIDS. We suffer from a disease called independence — a pathological aversion to regimentation and institutionalism — which prevents us from getting ‘regular’ jobs and living a ‘normal’ life.

The great hatred of capitalism in the hearts of the oppressed, ancient and modern, I think, stems not merely from the ensuing vast inequality in wealth, and the often unfair and arbitrary nature of who profits and who suffers, but from the silent acknowledgement that under a free market economy the many victims of the greed of the few are still better off than those under the utopian socialism of the well-intended. It is a hard thing for the poor to acknowledge benefits from their rich moral inferiors who never so intended it. (p.272)

The essential quality of a market system, contrary to popular thinking, is not that it promotes greed; but rather, that it renders greed harmless.

One of the most momentous, yet all but invisible, psychological changes in human history has been the intensification of a sense of insecurity and alienation from the world around us that arose when we became no longer able easily to get food in a few hours just by gathering it, or hunting it, but had to organize ourselves in a purposeful fashion simply to survive. This change is undocumented, though occasional clues can be gained about it from the comments of the few still alive who have lived through a version of it, such as old Australian Aboriginals. Its essence is subjection to a pervasive but unacknowledged, indeed unnamed, fear. It is the foundation of civilization.

A wealth of research confirms the importance of face-to-face contact. One experiment performed by two researchers at the University of Michigan challenged groups of six students to play a game in which everyone could earn money by cooperating. One set of groups met for ten minutes face-to-face to discuss strategy before playing. Another set of groups had thirty minutes for electronic interaction. The groups that met in person cooperated well and earned more money. The groups that had only connected electronically fell apart, as members put their personal gains ahead of the group’s needs. This finding resonates well with many other experiments, which have shown that face-to-face contact leads to more trust, generosity, and cooperation than any other sort of interaction.The very first experiment in social psychology was conducted by a University of Indiana psychologist who was also an avid bicyclist. He noted that “racing men” believe that “the value of a pace,” or competitor, shaves twenty to thirty seconds off the time of a mile. To rigorously test the value of human proximity, he got forty children to compete at spinning fishing reels to pull a cable. In all cases, the kids were supposed to go as fast as they could, but most of them, especially the slower ones, were much quicker when they were paired with another child. Modern statistical evidence finds that young professionals today work longer hours if they live in a metropolitan area with plenty of competitors in their own occupational niche.Supermarket checkouts provide a particularly striking example of the power of proximity. As anyone who has been to a grocery store knows, checkout clerks differ wildly in their speed and competence. In one major chain, clerks with differing abilities are more or less randomly shuffled across shifts, which enabled two economists to look at the impact of productive peers. It turns out that the productivity of average clerks rises substantially when there is a star clerk working on their shift, and those same average clerks get worse when their shift is filled with below-average clerks.Statistical evidence also suggests that electronic interactions and face-to-face interactions support one another; in the language of economics, they’re complements rather than substitutes. Telephone calls are disproportionately made among people who are geographically close, presumably because face-to-face relationships increase the demand for talking over the phone. And when countries become more urban, they engage in more electronic communications.

Setting a goal is like to set your destination point in your life GPS which could take you to your desire position as you dreamed about...

Your every positive action in your life will increase your self-esteem and this self-esteem will boost you for more positive action to take you on success

Give yourself a great self-respect to know who you are then your confidence will shine on you

Over time, this growing tendency of like marrying like will only reinforce clustering and geographic sorting along class lines, giving the emerging map of social, economic, and cultural segregation even greater permanence.

I have a dream, there will be critical point in the future,where economics and technology will negate each other.

Savers have to be punished so debtors can be saved.Why? Because if debtors are rescued, that makes it possible for more debts to be issued in the future.And why is that important? Because the banking system needs ever more loans in order to survive.

The real problems of our planet are not economic or technical, they are philosophical. The philosophy of unbridled materialism is being challenged by events.

The emotional pattern seems to be something like, “[Karl] Polanyi, a person of the left like me, says many true things, beautifully. Therefore his tales about what happened in economic history must be true.” Marx before him got similar treatment. Lately the more eloquent of the environmentalists, such as Wendell Berry, get it too. People want to believe that beauty is truth. A supporting emotional frame on the left arises from the very idea of historical progress: “We must be able to do so much better than this wretched capitalism.” It is not true, but it motivates.

Let's stop kidding ourselves that Greek debt is the Euro's key problem. With Greece gone, who's next ?

Nowadays… deals are transactional rather than personal. Instead of placing your faith in a person, you get lawyers to write safeguards into the contract. This is an historic shift from a trust economy to a risk economy. But trust is not a dispensable luxury. It is the very basis of our social life. Many scholars believe that capitalism had religious roots because people could trust other people who, feeling that they were answerable to God, could be relied on to be honest in business. A world without trust is a lonely and dangerous place.

Oil may run out, liquidity may dry up, but as long as ink flows freely, the next chapter of Life will continue to be written.

Man is smart - If money would have grown on trees, we would have used green leaves as money.

Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

International business, once allowed to stalk uncontrolled, killed the local, the small, the quirky.

Businesses are great structures for managing big projects. It’s like trying to develop the ability to walk without developing a skeleton. Once in a blue moon, you get an octopus, but for the most part, you get skeletons. Skeletons are good shit.

Facing a deteriorating economy and a weakening hold over the populace, the Iraqi state under Saddam Hussein opted to revitalize tribal leaders and conservative practices as a means of stabilizing state power; those conservative practices were not an inherent feature of a predominantly Muslim country.

We have not noticed how fast the rest has risen. Most of the industrialized world--and a good part of the nonindustrialized world as well--has better cell phone service than the United States. Broadband is faster and cheaper across the industrial world, from Canada to France to Japan, and the United States now stands sixteenth in the world in broadband penetration per capita. Americans are constantly told by their politicians that the only thing we have to learn from other countries' health care systems is to be thankful for ours. Most Americans ignore the fact that a third of the country's public schools are totally dysfunctional (because their children go to the other two-thirds). The American litigation system is now routinely referred to as a huge cost to doing business, but no one dares propose any reform of it. Our mortgage deduction for housing costs a staggering $80 billion a year, and we are told it is crucial to support home ownership, except that Margaret Thatcher eliminated it in Britain, and yet that country has the same rate of home ownership as the United States. We rarely look around and notice other options and alternatives, convinced that "we're number one.

A person's right to a job is as specious as his boss' right to success in business. There is no right to a minimum wage, just as there is no right to success in self-employment.

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...

Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is the economic way of doing things.

either on a competitive or a cartel basis.

The term cartel was virtually unknown to the American language a generation ago. Like most borrowed words, when first taken over it meant different things to different persons. Time was required to crystallize its meaning. In this country it now commonly refers to international marketing arrangements. In a companion study we have defined such a cartel as an arrangement among, or on behalf of, producers engaged in the same line of business designed to limit or eliminate competition among them.

Social responsibility is a fundamentally subversive doctrine" in a free society, and have said that in such a society, "there is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.

Interest in such organizations is too often linked to the fringe and marginal or thought to be little more than conspiracy theories. While such a critique is not entirely incorrect, we will see that hidden organizations are far more common, more important, and more consequential than we have typically allowed ourselves to admit. As a result, they also need to be better integrated into thinking about organizations by scholars, policymakers, and everyday citizens.

The problem with capitalism is that "we have a global theology without morality, without a Bible." And that's dangerous, he warns - "we're not going to be able to exist in a global context if we are the bastards of our business.

The technical developments of almost every form of wealth [e.g., oil, minerals] are the forebears of Big Business; and Big Business, directly or indirectly, is the immediate cause of War.

The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that nanoseconds had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all.

1. Stop blaming China We taught them how to do what they are doing2. Take responsibility – purchase consciously, purchase less, don’t go for lowest possible price3. Follow good business ethics, it’s a two way street4. Create global partnerships in a global village, create a true Win-Win situation with your supplier, consider the supplier a partner (what a concept!)5. End the Price Pressure: Boycott Walmart & Club-buying stores, not China. Stop buying what you don’t need!

100 trillion is 100 followed by 12 zeroes

The opportunity cost of an unlived dream is not only that dream, but also the dreams the dream was meant to inspire.

Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.

Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.

We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you're looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.

The vast majority of Americans, at all coordinates of the economic spectrum, consider themselves middle class; this is a deeply ingrained, distinctly American cognitive dissonance.

Most of us have no sympathy with the rich idler who spends his life in pleasure without ever doing any work. But even he fulfills a function in the life of the social organism. He sets an example of luxury that awakens in the multitude a consciousness of new needs and gives industry the incentive to fulfill them.

Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very poor, or the very rich. A society that fosters intense dependence on commodities thus turns its unemployed into either its poor or its dependents.

The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed.

For whom, I asked myself innocently, were the riches and dominions that the English conquered and held on to at any price in the most remote corners of the planet? The neighborhoods which succeeded one another interminably down the narrow cobbled streets were not inhabited by the beneficiaries of those enterprises.

To attempt to increase the wealth of any country, either by introducing or by detaining in it an unnecessary quantity of gold and silver, is as absurd as it would be to attempt to increase the good cheer of private families by obliging them to keep an unnecessary number of kitchen utensils.

You will miss a normal life while living a successful life, but not as much as the craving for a successful life while you were living a normal life.

If you have money but not love you will somehow manage, but if you don't have both then you are in serious trouble.

Apart from the economic value, money does have high moral value.

Rich or poor it’s nice to have money

Now, it’s true that some of the protesters are oddly dressed or have silly-sounding slogans, which is inevitable given the open character of the events. But so what? I, at least, am a lot more offended by the sight of exquisitely tailored plutocrats, who owe their continued wealth to government guarantees, whining that President Obama has said mean things about them than I am by the sight of ragtag young people denouncing consumerism.

1 billion people in the world are chronically hungry. 1 billion people are overweight.

The three wealthiest people in the world own more than the GDP of forty-eight countries!

You eat the wealthy, sir, and it will be your last meal.

The rich feel much less need than their predecessors to account for their wealth, whether to society, to governments or to God. Their attitudes and values are not seriously challenged by anyone. The respect now shown for wealth and money-making has been the most fundamental change in Britain over four decades.

Experience has taught us that material wants know no natural bounds, that they will expand without end unless we consciously restrain them. Capitalism rests precisely on this endless expansion of wants. That is why, for all its success, it remains so unloved. It has given us wealth beyond measure, but has taken away the chief benefit of wealth: the consciousness of having enough.

An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.

Wherever the shadow of economic growth touches us, we are left useless unless employed on a job or engaged in consumption...We lose sight of our resources, lose control over the environmental conditions which make these resources applicable, lose taste for self-reliant coping with challenges from without and anxiety from within.

Sustainability is a new idea to many people, and many find it hard to understand. But all over the world there are people who have entered into the exercise of imagining and bringing into being a sustainable world. They see it as a world to move toward not reluctantly, but joyfully, not with a sense of sacrifice, but a sense of adventure. A sustainable world could be very much better than the one we live in today.

A long decade ago economic growth was the reigning fashion of political economy. It was simultaneously the hottest subject of economic theory and research, a slogan eagerly claimed by politicians of all stripes, and a serious objective of the policies of governments. The climate of opinion has changed dramatically. Disillusioned critics indict both economic science and economic policy for blind obeisance to aggregate material "progress," and for neglect of its costly side effects. Growth, it is charged, distorts national priorities, worsens the distribution of income, and irreparably damages the environment. Paul Erlich speaks for a multitude when he says, "We must acquire a life style which has as its goal maximum freedom and happiness for the individual, not a maximum Gross National Product." [in Nordhaus, William D. and James Tobin., "Is growth obsolete?" Economic Research: Retrospect and Prospect Vol 5: Economic Growth. Nber, 1972. 1-80]

Don't you know there's another bubble as well? An expectations bubble. Bigger houses, private planes, yachts... stupid salaries and bonuses. People come to desire these things and expect them. But the expectations bubble will burst as well, as all bubbles do.

If nonsatiety were the natural state of human nature then aggressive want-stimulating advertising would not be necessary, nor would the barrage of novelty aimed at promoting dissatisfaction with last year's model. The system attempts to remake people to fit its own presuppositions. If people's wants are not naturally insatiable we must make them so, in order to keep the system going.

The United States spends over $87 billion conducting a war in Iraq while the United Nations estimates that for less than half that amount we could provide clean water, adequate diets, sanitations services and basic education to every person on the planet. And we wonder why terrorists attack us.

People.. were poor not because they were stupid or lazy. They worked all day long, doing complex physical tasks. They were poor because the financial institution in the country did not help them widen their economic base.

What I did not know yet about hunger, but would find out over the next twenty-one years, was that brilliant theorists of economics do not find it worthwhile to spend time discussing issues of poverty and hunger. They believe that these will be resolved when general economic prosperity increases. These economists spend all their talents detailing the process of development and prosperity, but rarely reflect on the origin and development of poverty and hunger. A a result, poverty continues.

Th direct elimination of elimination of poverty should be the objective of all development aid. Development should be viewed as a human rights issue, not as a question of simply increasing the gross national product (GNP).

Recent evidence confirms that retail prices of essential consumer goods in poor countries are not appreciably lower than in the United States or Western Europe. In fact, with deregulation and "free trade", the cost of living in many Third World cities is now higher than in the United States. My experience in Latin America and Haiti is that the prices of meat, fish and fresh vegetables are about the same as in the United States. Can you imagine eating on less than one dollar a day?

The best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back, by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.

By and large, the poor do not want some small life. They don't want to game the system or eke out an existence; they want to thrive and contribute.

No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.

It is quite wrong to assume that poor people are generally unwilling to change; but the proposed change must stand in some organic relationship to what they are doing already, and they are rightly suspicious of, and resistant to, radical changes proposed by town-based and office-bound innovators who approach them in the spirit of: "You just get out of my way and I shall show you how useless you are and how splendidly the job can be done with a lot of foreign money and outlandish equipment.

Every era in the continent's vaunted developmental story had its own taxonomy of waste people-unwanted and unsalvageable. Each era had its own means of distancing its version of white trash from the mainstream ideal.

The poor stay poor here because they do not save enough.

Poverty in western Mexico is an Unconditional Sentence.

In the same essay, Said (who is reviewing Peter Stansky and William Abrams, co-authors obsessed with the Blair/Orwell distinction) congratulates them on their forceful use of tautology:This is rather extraordinary. Orwell did indeed meet Garrett in Liverpool in 1936, and was highly impressed to find that he knew him already through his pseudonymous writing—under the name Matt Lowe—for John Middleton Murry’s Adelphi. As he told his diary:Thus the evidence that supposedly shames Orwell by contrast is in fact supplied by—none other than Orwell himself! This is only slightly better than the other habit of his foes, which is to attack him for things he quotes other people as saying, as if he had instead said them himself. (The idea that a writer must be able to ‘afford’ to write is somewhat different and, as an idea, is somewhat—to use a vogue term of the New Left—‘problematic’. If it were only the bourgeois who were able to write, much work would never have been penned and, incidentally, Orwell would never have met Garrett in the first place.)

So let us be clear about this up front: We hope to recruit you to join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women's power as economic catalysts. That is the process under way - not a drama of victimization but of empowerment, the kind that transforms bubbly teenage girls from brothel slaves into successful businesswomen.This is a story of transformation. It is change that is already taking place, and change that can accelerate if you'll just open your heart and join in.

We must arm ourselves with patience and wisdom and listen to the poor what they want. This is the best way to avoid the trap of ignorance, ideology and inertia on our side.

Writers are writing in every corner of the globe.Writers are writing, moreover, in rich countries and poor countries alike.

Remember, aid cannot achieve the end of poverty. Only homegrown development base on the dynamism of individuals and firms in free markets can do that.

What good does it do a black youth to know that an employer must pay him $2 an hour if the fact that he must be paid that amount is what keeps him from getting a job?

This is the basis for the most important critique of microfinance. The poor are not entrepreneurs. The idea that more than a few will turn tiny loans into a viable business is simply unrealistic.

The essential difference between rich societies and poor societies does not stem from any greater effort the former devote to work, nor even from any greater technological knowledge the former hold. Instead it arises mainly from the fact that rich nations possess a more extensive network of capital goods wisely invested from an entrepreneurial standpoint. These goods consists of machines, tools, computers, buildings, semi-manufactured goods, software, etc., and they exist due to prior savings of the nation's citizens. In other words, comparatively rich societies possess more wealth because they have more time accumulated in the form of capital goods, which places them closer in time to the achievement of much more valuable goals.

Democracy is supposed to be ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’. Capitalism is ‘of the capitalist, for the capitalist’. Period.

Honey, it isn’t democracy that runs this country. Capitalism rules. It does no good to reason with the capitalists or their politicians. This is a class war. We have to stir up the American people, the lower class. Some of the better-off lower class do show some sympathy for us when they’re smacked with the facts. And when they voice themselves collectively, good things happen.” — Mother Jones

I am a citizen of this country,” I declare, “and Mr. Mayor, tonight I will be a citizen of this city when I put my shoes under my bed. The courageous men, women and children who are with me (blocked from crossing the bridge into NYC) are also citizens of this country and will be sleeping near their shoes too. I want them with me tonight, here, in the city of New York. We are all American citizens.” — Mother Jones

What the hell’s the matter with you men? Are you cowards as well as stupid? You boys make me sick. I’m done with you. You hear me? I want you to go back to your places now and stay with your children until I say you’re needed.“Tell your wives and your older children to bring with them dish pans and cooking pots. Tell them to bring their stirring spoons and ladles. Tell them to carry a mop over their shoulders. We’re goin’ to march on that mine and we’re going to stand guard to see that no scabs are allowed in. Do you hear me?” — Mother Jones

Go home now,” says I. “Keep away from the saloons. Save your money. You are going to need it.”“What are we going to need it for?” asks a voice from the crowd.“For guns and ammunition,” says I.

To the RKO motion picture camera at her 100th birthday party: “I pray for the day when working men and women are able to earn a fair share of the wealth they produce in a capitalist system, a day when all Americans are able to enjoy the freedom, rights and opportunities guaranteed them by the Constitution of the United States of America.” — Mother Jones

Turning back to the crowd I say, “I am duty bound to make this plea, but I want to say, with all due respect to the governor here, that I doubt seriously that he will do — cannot do — anything. And for the reason that he is owned, lock, stock and barrel, by the capitalists who placed him here in this building.” — Mother Jones

That’s got to stop,” says I. “The idea of any blood-thirsty pirate (Mexican President Diaz) sitting on a throne and reaching across the border to tromp on our Constitution makes my blood boil.” — Mother Jones

I go back to the union man and say, “Sir, this is a house of God, not a proper place for a union meeting. I have some things to say today that God would not want to hear in His own house. Boys, I want you to get up, every one of you, and go across the road. I want you to sit down on the hillside over there and wait for me to speak to you.

What do you see out there?” I ask. “Pittsburgh,” he replies. Now I laugh. “No, young man. What you see is hell with the lid taken off.” — Mother Jones

Well, honey, it’s capitalism that brings out the meanness and greed,” says I. “Our founding fathers did a decent job of framing our democracy. They wrote the Constitution and added a Bill of Rights that intended for people of all classes to enjoy the freedoms the Constitution offers. But capitalism came along without a constitution or a bill of rights and the industrialists grabbed unrestricted power. The capitalists wrote their own ‘Declaration of Capitalism’.” — Mother Jones

Inevitably, people tell me that poor folks are lazy or unintelligent, that they are somehow deserving of their poverty. However, if you begin to look at the sociological literature on poverty, a more complex picture emerges. Poverty and unemployment are part and parcel of our economic order. Without them, capitalism would cease to function effectively, and in order to continue to function, the system itself must produce poverty and an army of underemployed or unemployed people.

Or how does it happen that trade, which after all is nothing more than the exchange of products of various individuals and countries, rules the whole world through the relation of supply and demand—a relation which, as an English economist says, hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients, and with invisible hand allots fortune and misfortune to men, sets up empires and overthrows empires, causes nations to rise and to disappear—while with the abolition of the basis of private property, with the communistic regulation of production (and implicit in this, the destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control again?

Socialism may be established by force, as in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—or by vote, as in Nazi (National Socialist) Germany. The degree of socialization may be total, as in Russia—or partial, as in England. Theoretically, the differences are superficial; practically, they are only a matter of time. The basic principle, in all cases, is the same.

A valid contract requires voluntary offer, acceptance, and consideration.

The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule.

What ranks above all else for economic and political reconstruction is a radical change of ideologies. Economic prosperity is not so much a material problem; it is, first of all, an intellectual, spiritual, and moral problem.

There is only a certain amount of wealth in the world, this thinking goes. Economics is a matter of acquiring and allocating, not creating. This was the view of the world’s smartest people, all top philosophers and not stupid people, for many thousands of years before the age of the enlightenment. It still is.

Growing economies are built by billions of actors behaving according to their own interests, coordinated through institutions that no one in particular created.Realizing this requires humility, a trait that is in short supply among would-be dictators, politicians, and bureaucrats, which is precisely why these groups are the proven enemies of prosperity in all times and places.

Government should never be able to do anything you can't do. If you can't steal from your neighbor, you can't send the government to steal for you.

There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure.

Monopoly is a market, or part of a market, reserved to the exclusive possession of one or more sellers by means of the initiation of physical force by the government, or with the sanction of the government. Monopoly exists insofar as the freedom of competition is violated, with the freedom of competition being understood as the absence of the initiation of physical force as the preventive of competition. Where there is no initiation of physical force to violate the freedom of competition, there is no monopoly. The freedom of competition is violated only insofar as individuals are excluded from markets or parts of markets by means of the initiation of physical force. Monopoly is thus a market or part of a market reserved to the exclusive possession of one or more sellers by means of the initiation of physical force. It is thus something imposed upon the market from without—by the government. (Private individuals—gangsters—can initiate force to reserve markets only if the government allows it and thereby sanctions it.)Thus, monopoly is not something which emerges from the normal operation of the economic system, and which the government must control.

Laissez faire (in its full true meaning) opens the way to the realization of the noble dreams of socialism.

To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There's no way around it. We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there's a sense in which it doesn't matter that these people's dreams are based on, embedded in, intertwined with, and formed by an inherently destructive economic and social system. Their dreams are still their dreams. What right do I -- or does anyone else -- have to destroy them.At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world?

If you invest all your energy in economics, world commerce, parliamentarianism, military engagements, power and power politics, -if you take the quantum of intelligence, seriousness, will, and self-overcoming that you embody and expend it all in this one direction, there there won't be any left for the other direction. Culture and the state - let us be honest with ourselves - these are adversaries.

When you conform to the monoculture's version of who you are and what the world is like, you lose your freedom along with your ability to be truly innovative in terms of your own life. Being able to draw on many different stories, not just the economic one, allows you to creatively and authentically meet the challenges that face you in your life. The monoculture, determinedly single-minded, insists that economic values and assumptions can be used to solve your problems, whether those problems are spiritual, political, intellectual, or relational.

we deceive ourselves if we believe we can hold on to old models as "ideologies whimper off to a shallow grave in prolonged agony of people, institutions and cultures.

Now here's somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he's caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it's absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That's the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons

The individualism of current economic theory is manifest in the purely self-interested behavior it generally assumes. It has no real place for fairness, malevolence, and benevolence, nor for the preservation of human life or any other moral concern.

If it's okay to enrich ourselves by denying foreigners the right to earn a living, why shouldn't we enrich ourselves by invading peaceful countries and seizing their assets? Most of us don't think that's a good idea, and not just because it might backfire. We don't think it's a good idea because we believe human beings have human rights, whatever their colour and wherever they live. Stealing assets is wrong, and so is stealing the right to earn a living, no matter where the victim was born.

Those who believe that liberal democracy and the free market can be defended by the force of law and regulation alone, without an internalised sense of duty and morality, are tragically mistaken.

I can never look at these apparent contradictions between the great laws of nature without a feeling of physical uneasiness which amounts to suffering. Were mankind reduced to the necessity of choosing between two parties, one of whom injures his interest, and the other his conscience, we should have nothing to hope from the future. Happily, this is not the case; and to see Aristus regain his economical superiority, as well as his moral superiority, it is sufficient to understand this consoling maxim, which is no less true from having a paradoxical appearance, “To save is to spend.

Economics without ethics is a caricature. Ethics without economics is a fairy tale.

At the same time, however, the necessity for economic change in our countries has led us to conceive laws and accept traditions often at the expense of the individual person. Just when many are becoming conscious of the fundamental heritage of the Judeo-Christian tradition to respect each human person, friend or foe, within the actual structure of our society to apply this truth. The very efficiency demanded by our technocratic industrial society renders the life of the old, the unstable and the handicapped almost impossible. as the values of efficiency, individualism, and wealth become the only motivations, they tend to stifle the profound aspirations of man so that little by little he loses all sense of fellowship and community.

There is nothing as dangerous as an economist who only knows economics except the moral philosopher who knows no economics.

Does a population have informed consent when that population is not taught the inner workings of its monetary system, and then is drawn, all unknowing, into economic adventures?

Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations. (from 'Compromise, Hell!' published in the November/December 2004 issue of ORION magazine)

The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.

Sustainability is best illustrated by those who sell food … just so they afford something to eat.

Food is a product of supply and demand, so try to figure out where the supplies are fresh, the suppliers are creative, and the demanders are informed.

In California, the state's huge dairy herd produces twenty-seven million tons of manure a year, the particulates and vapors from which have helped to make air quality in the argiculturally intensive San Joaquin Valley worse than it is Los Angeles.

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

By this means the government may secretly and unobserved, confiscate the wealth of the people, and not one man in a million will detect the theft.

In my considered opinion, salary is payment for goods delivered and it must conform to the law of supply and demand. If, therefore, the fixed salary is a violation of this law - as, for instance, when I see two engineers leaving college together and both equally well trained and efficient, and one getting forty thousand while the other only earns two thousand , or when lawyers and hussars, possessing no special qualifications, are appointed directors of banks with huge salaries - I can only conclude that their salaries are not fixed according to the law of supply and demand but simply by personal influence. And this is an abuse important in itself and having a deleterious effect on government service.

Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.

What all these lofty and vague phrases boil down to is that the court can impose things that the voters don't want and the Constitution does not require, but which are in vogue in circles to which the court responds.

Corporations barely pay taxes. The corporate tax rate is already very low, but corporations have worked out an array of complicated techniques so they often don't have to pay taxes at all... The scale of sheer robbery by corporate power is enormous.

It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader. Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing 'compassion' for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.

Once you understand the economics of the Austrian School and the philosophy of liberty in the tradition of Rothbard, you never look at anything – not the state, the media, the central bank, the political class, nothing – the same way again.

The law is guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish.

Experience teaches effectually, but brutally. It makes us acquainted with all the effects of an action, by causing us to feel them; and we cannot fail to finish by knowing that fire burns, if we have burned ourselves. For this rough teacher, I should like, if possible, to substitute a more gentle one. I mean Foresight. For this purpose I shall examine the consequences of certain economical phenomena, by placing in opposition to each other those which are seen, and those which are not seen.