free enterprise: Jay's Tuesday Free Enterprise Quote - 15 May 2012
- 05/14/12 07:32 PM
"Every innovation makes its appearance as a 'luxury' of the few well-to-do. After industry has become aware of it, the luxury then becomes a 'necessity' for all."
Ludwig von Mises (1881 - 1973)
Ironically, the very year Dr. von Mises died, I was studying economics in college and really, really wanted a calculator.
The two most prominent manufacturers were Hewlett Packard and Texas Instruments.
The HPs were very expensive, and difficult to use. I found them impossible! To merely calculate 2 + 2 required many key strokes, and to my mind their process was not the least logical.
Texas Instruments … (20 comments)
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free enterprise: Jay's Tuesday Free Enterprise Quote - 8 May 2012
- 05/08/12 07:32 PM
"Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences."
C. S. Lewis (1898 - 1963)
Notice how those who would interfere with the free market, thinking they can do it better themselves, make life more difficult in doing so?
Notice how those who would create bureaucracy on top of bureaucracy, thinking the new one will make things better yet, make life more difficult in doing so?
Notice how those who would regulate the free market to death, thinking the regulation does it better than a trillion decision … (19 comments)
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free enterprise: Jay's Tuesday Free Enterprise Quote - 1 May 2012
- 04/30/12 08:46 PM
"Democratic government has this fundamental problem: In broad terms, 20 percent of the people do most of the productive work and create most of the nation's wealth, but the other 80 percent command a heavy majority of votes."
Thomas G. Donlan
Well, this is certainly another view of the 1%!
It is also another take on the old "Pareto Principle," that everyone learns about in Econ 101 - the old 80/20 rule.
This doctrine stems from the 1906 statement of an Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto. He observed that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the … (24 comments)
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free enterprise: Jay's Tuesday Free Enterprise Quote - 24 April 2012
- 04/23/12 06:48 PM
"The way to crush the bourgeois is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation."
Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov (AKA Nicholai Lenin) 1870 - 1924
First, we have to define a couple of words.
The word bourgeois, for Lenin, was to help him define society into three players - the workers, the exploiters and HIM.
An exploitative bourgeois did not simply describe the fat, mean, selfish, sloppy, gluttonous man, with money dropping from his pockets and blood dripping from the club he used to keep everyone in his factory working 19 hours a day. The bourgeois also included the single … (20 comments)
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free enterprise: Jay's Tuesday Free Enterprise Quote - 17 April 2012
- 04/16/12 07:17 PM
"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it."
Benjamin Franklin (1705 - 1790)
Those sound like the words of an adult. They are the words of a leader.
Why would people want to be in an "easy" poverty? What is easy about that?
And why would a leader want people to be in an "easy" poverty? Where is that leading them? It is leading them to a … (24 comments)
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free enterprise: Jay's Tuesday Free Enterprise Quote - 10 April 2012
- 04/09/12 06:04 PM
"It should be noted that people in the free market rarely bare false witness; integrity is the rule. The morning milk, phone calls, planes the airlines buy, autos by the millions - no one could list the instances - are as represented. We have daily, eloquent, enormous testimony that the Ten Commandments can be and are observed by fallible human beings. Contemporary politics is the most glaring of all exceptions.
Leonard E. Read (1898 - 1983)
And all the recent talk of civility and not attacking the person but engaging the idea, is all so much fluff! Those who talk about … (13 comments)
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free enterprise: Jay's Tuesday Free Enterprise Quote - 3 April 2012
- 04/02/12 07:24 PM
"Unfortunately, it is not in the power of government to make everyone more prosperous. Government can only raise the income of one person by taking from another."
Hans F. Sennholz (1922 - 2007)
Austrian-school economist Hans Sennholz understood that gubment has a lot of power.
But, as an economist, he understood that it only goes so far.
It is not powerful to take. It is powerful to be able to set the rules so that the taking can "legally" happen! Especially under the guise of "doing good."
But what happens when gubment redistributes "wealth" with impunity, penalizing those who would not … (20 comments)
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free enterprise: Jay's Tuesday Free Enterprise Quote - 27 March 2012
- 03/26/12 07:21 PM
Remember last week's Ralph Waldo Emerson quote?
It was something like, "If you build a better mouse trap, the world will beat a path to your door."
That wasn't Emerson's real quote, as we learned.
You can read the entire, and correct, quote here.
And it is true.
What is going on in the photo?
What is the company? How do you know what the company is?
I took this photo at one of this company's two local retail establishments. This photo was taken, by me, at around 2pm. I intentionally went in there at that time to … (25 comments)
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free enterprise: Jay's Tuesday Free Enterprise Quote - 20 March 2012
- 03/19/12 09:04 PM
"If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
That is the real quote. There is a similar one, attributed to Emerson, but probably not really said by him. It is just as descriptive, and says:
Build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door.
The mouse trap is the most oft-accepted patent request, with 4,400, … (15 comments)
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free enterprise: Jay's Tuesday Free Enterprise Quote - 13 March 2012
- 03/12/12 08:14 PM
"Necessity never made a good bargain."
Benjamin Franklin (1705-1790)
You ever notice that this is how gubment works?
Here is the process:
Gubment creates a disaster.
Let's take banking. It happens slowly. Centuries of successful banking practices, proven through experience and data, needed changing. It was a necessity.
First came "racial steering." Realtors and brokers could no longer steer prospective buyers to or from certain neighborhoods. Civil rights laws were "changing," crime statistics were "changing," and there was no longer a need to promote or prevent certain people to or from neighborhoods.
Of course people's attitudes had to change too, hence … (19 comments)
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free enterprise: Jay's Tuesday Free Enterprise Quote - 6 March 2012
- 03/05/12 08:06 PM
"The idea that even the brightest person or group of bright people, much less the U.S. Congress, can wisely manage an economy has to be the height of arrogance and conceit."
Walter E. Williams
Can I start with this?
AN ECONOMY CAN'T BE MANAGED.
Dr. Williams knows that! Any economist knows that!
No group of people, bureaucrats, congressmen (!), economists, statisticians, clairvoyants - you name it - no group of people can manage an economy!
What is the only thing that can "wisely manage an economy"?
The famous Adam Smith INVISIBLE HAND.
Milton Friedman went a step further. He called it … (32 comments)
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free enterprise: Jay's Tuesday Free Enterprise Quote - 28 February 2012
- 02/27/12 08:25 PM
"The guiding purpose of the government regulator is to prevent rather than to create something."
Alan Greenspan
Gubment doesn't create anything - not jobs, not economic activity, not wealth.
But it can go a long way toward PREVENTING all those things from being created by a free market economy.
How? The easiest way is crushing gubment regulation. When
oil companies cannot drill (or drill where there is oil), banks have to lend or have to lend in certain ways contrary to long-held banking practices, the general populace has to hire accountants to do their taxes so they don't get into trouble … (18 comments)
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free enterprise: Jay's Tuesday Free Enterprise Quote - 21 February 2012
- 02/21/12 04:33 PM
"When the government is involved in business, it’s hard for private companies to compete. The Chinese government is smothering the private sector. The usurping of private enterprise has become so evident that the Chinese have given it a nickname: 'guojin mintui.' That roughly translates as 'while the state advances, the privates retreat.' If the government doesn’t interfere, these entrepreneurs would be productive.
There are a variety of reasons the Chinese government is seeking an enlarged role in the economy — including fears that wealthy entrepreneurs could begin to challenge the Communist Party. There is also an ingrained belief among … (13 comments)
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free enterprise: Jay's Tuesday Free Enterprise Quote - 14 February 2012
- 02/13/12 10:43 PM
"The first man gets the oyster, the second man gets the shell."
Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919)
What does that mean?
Carnegie is the quintessential rags to riches story. Moving to Pennsylvania in 1848, he found work as a bobbin boy changing spools of thread in a cotton mill. He worked 6 days a week, for 12 hours a day and was paid $1.20 per week.
Finding a job that paid $2.50 per week (!) as a messenger boy in the Pittsburgh office of the Ohio Telegraph Company, he jumped right in.
Here is where the quote comes in. As a 16 year … (26 comments)
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free enterprise: Jay's Tuesday Free Enterprise Quote - 7 February 2012
- 02/07/12 08:52 PM
Patrick Henry lived his entire life in what was to become the Commonwealth of Virginia. His life spanned 1736-1799. He served as Virginia's first and sixth governor.
Elected to the House of Burgesses from rural Louisa County in Virginia, he is most famous for a speech given 23 March 1775 at the Virginia Convention held at the St. John's Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia.
Still there, as the oldest church in Virginia, the church is located at 2401 East Broad Street.
The church was selected as the site to house the Virginia Convention to determine if Virginia would send troops to … (22 comments)
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free enterprise: Jay's Tuesday Free Enterprise Quote - 31 January 12
- 01/30/12 11:17 PM
"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government - lest it come to dominate our lives and interests."
Patrick Henry (1736-1799)
So here is yet ANOTHER Founding Father's prescience that we have not taken to heart.
Or listened to.
Actually we, as a people, as THE PEOPLE, have listened less and less over the centuries to the wisdom, advice and pleadings of the Founding Fathers.
We have given up our liberties little by little for what we have thought to be protection and security. It … (46 comments)
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free enterprise: Jay's Tuesday Free Enterprise Quote - 24 January 2012
- 01/23/12 10:29 PM
"Never was capitalism imposed on life as a system, or at all. It grew out of life, not all at once but gradually, and is therefore one of the great natural designs. When it was found and identified by such men as Adam Smith, who wrote its bible, and Karl Marx, who wrote its obituary too soon, it was already working."
Garet Garrett (1878 - 1954)
Two key words in that statement above: grew and natural.
Historically it grew where it had opportunity. Where would that have been? Where markets and voluntary exchange had more and more given opportunity. Where there … (22 comments)
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free enterprise: Jay's Tuesday Free Enterprise Quote - 17 January 12
- 01/16/12 10:29 PM
“There is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”
Benjamin Franklin (1705-1790)
What is despotism? According to Oxford, it is ruling with absolute power, especially exercising it in an oppressive way.
Then what does Franklin mean?
Franklin considered the intrusion of gubment into our … (21 comments)
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free enterprise: Jay's Tuesday Free Enterprise Quote - 10 January 12
- 01/09/12 10:39 PM
"Force always attracts men of low morality."
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
When someone wants to spend a lifetime in gubment, it is about force.
When someone in gubment does continual end runs around the Constitution to "get things accomplished," it is about force.
When gubment programs are implemented that leave a citizenry with no choice, it is about force.
The corollary to Dr. Einstein's statement is that force does not attract men of high morality.
Why not?
Because of the law of attraction! Light cleaves unto light, love gravitates toward love, cleanliness desires to be clean, and the godly seek God. This … (28 comments)
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free enterprise: Jay's Tuesday Free Enterprise Quote - 3 January 12
- 01/02/12 11:35 PM
"You can start right where you stand and apply the habit of going the extra mile by rendering more service and better service than you are now being paid for."
Napoleon Hill (1883-1970)
If you have never heard of Napoleon Hill, you should get to know him. His book, Think and Grow Rich, is one of the best-selling books of all time, selling over 20 million copies.
Before I even begin, do you think that anyone "occupying" a park somewhere, demanding this and that be provided by other people, would understand a word of that quote above? That lack of understanding … (29 comments)
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