Quotes About Economy

A central economic problem of developed societies during the next twenty or thirty years is surely going to be capital formation; only in Japan is it still adequate for the economy's needs. We therefore can ill afford to have activities conducted as 'non-profit', that is, as activities that devour capital rather than form it, if they can be organized as activities that form capital, as activities that make a profit.

If we decide that we have to abolish or curtail economic freedom as potentially demon-provoking, the danger is very great that we shall soon feel all freedom threatens to release the demonic forces.

Protectionism could indeed make the world economy poor and impede its functioning to the point of near-collapse. But it cannot destroy the common demands. It cannot undo the worldwide horizon and vision. The fundamental change has happened irrevocably. The question is not whether it will remain. The question is whether it can be turned to advantage—for society, for the individual, and for the business enterprise.

German businesses

I once spent a night at a truck stop in Shandong Province, on the east coast, asking drivers about what they carried. Two men had a truck full of bamboo whisk brooms; they had just dropped off a shipment of non-ferrous metal... Others had gone from chemical materials to radiators, from tennis shoes to dynamos. They were the alchemists of the new economy, at the center of every mysterious exchange that occurs along the Chinese road system.

The Chinese people had invented the compass, paper, the printing press, gunpowder, the seismograph, the crossbow, and the umbrella; they had sailed to Africa in the fifteenth century; they had constructed the Great Wall; over the past decade they had built their economy at a rate never before seen in the developing world. They could return a rental car with exactly three-eighths of a tank of gas, but filling it was apparently beyond the realm of cultural possibility.

Corporate profits are up fifty-five-fold since World War II, and the stock market is up sixtyfold. Four wars, nine recessions, eight presidents, and one impeachment didn't change that.

DEATH BY CHINA Confronting the Dragon—A Global Call to Action

a company.' 'You're losing me, Gerry.' 'High finance and corporate

Wages therefore tend to the lowest possible level compatible with keeping an adequate supply of workers alive.

find it difficult to believe that economic or information-processing advantages were the primary drivers of the transition to large-scale societies. Archaic-style states of which we have direct knowledge, such as Hawaii, did not have complex economies or specialized decision-making procedures (to deal with what kinds of problems?). The chiefs were involved with war and ritual; the economy worked well enough when left to the commoners. In any case, it's hard to imagine that

The powers that be don't necessarily view you as a citizen, a voter, or a person. You're a consumer. You're someone who buys products, then consumes them. After you eat it, use it up, or wear it out, you buy more.

Law of economy: nothing is waste. Even the unreal. What a sublimity in the process.

Tu, in quanto prodotto della tua società socialista, sei abituato a enormi sprechi. Io, tuttavia, sono ancora per la libera impresa. 'Risparmiare è guadagnare...

The big economic forces had managed to remain free, although virtually everything else had been absorbed by the Government. Laws that had been eased away from the private person still protected property and industry.

Don't let anybody kid you about the wheel, son; money was mankind's first significant invention.

The word around good old Table 64 last night was that in primitive and incredibly poor Cozumel the U.S. dollar is treated like a UFO: "They worship it when it lands.

As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome

We can't, it seems, live without [capitalism] even as we complain about it.

Ludwig von Mises wrote a book on socialism that predicted the catastrophe we see before us. Socialist economy, he argued, was economic irrationality, and socialist planning a prescription for chaos. Only a capitalist market could provide a system of rational allocations and rational accounts. Only private property and the profit-motive could unleash the forces of individual initiative and human creativity to produce real and expanding wealth—not only for the rich but

HIGHER EDUCATION TODAY is a good news-bad news story. The good news is that a university degree can provide a pass to all to the prodigious bounties of the American economy. The bad news is that the price of the pass can be the equivalent of a Ferrari, putting the average student into hock for a good chunk of his or her working life.

In the vast library of socialist theory, and in all of Marx's compendious works, there is not a chapter devoted to the creation of wealth—to what will cause human beings to work and innovate, or to what will make their efforts efficient. Socialism is strictly a plan of morally-sanctioned theft. It is about dividing up what others have created. Consequently, socialist economies create poverty instead of wealth.

The law of socialist economy is this: from each according to his exploitability, to the nomenklatura according to its greed.

Government-imposed loan standards precipitated a banking crisis, which was solved by a government bailout and control of the banks. As a result, little by little, fewer and fewer are making more and more banking decisions. Government