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Any Consideration Of The Life And Larger Social Existence Of The Modern Corporate Man Begins And Also Largely Ends With The Effect Of One All-embracing Force. That Is Organization - The Highly Structured Assemblage Of Men, And Now Some Women, Of Which He Is A Part. It Is To This, At The Expense Of Family, Friends, Sex, Recreation And Sometimes Health And Effective Control Of Alcoholic Intake, That He Is Expected To Devote His Energies.

-John Kenneth Galbraith

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Any Consideration Of The

John Kenneth Galbraith

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Any Consideration Of The Life And Larger Social Existence Of The Modern Corporate Man Begins And Also Largely Ends With The Effect Of One All-embracing Force. That Is Organization - The Highly Structured Assemblage Of Men, And Now Some Women, Of Which He Is A Part. It Is To This, At The Expense Of Family, Friends, Sex, Recreation And Sometimes Health And Effective Control Of Alcoholic Intake, That He Is Expected To Devote His Energies.

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The Oldest [john Kenneth] Galbraith Rule Is That When You Hear That A New Era Has Dawned, You Should Take Cover.

Any Consideration Of The Life And Larger Social Existence Of The Modern Corporate Man Begins And Also Largely Ends With The Effect Of One All-embracing Force. That Is Organization - The Highly Structured Assemblage Of Men, And Now Some Women, Of Which He Is A Part. It Is To This, At The Expense Of Family, Friends, Sex, Recreation And Sometimes Health And Effective Control Of Alcoholic Intake, That He Is Expected To Devote His Energies.

If All Else Fails Immortality Can Always Be Assured By Adequate Error.

Very Important Functions Can Be Performed Very Wastefully And Often Are.

The Foresight Of Financial Experts Was, As So Often, A Poor Guide To The Future.

World War Ii Revealed Two Of The Enduring Features Of The Keynesian Revolution. One Was The Moral Difference Between Spending For Welfare And Spending For War. During The Depression Very Modest Outlays For The Unemployed Seemed Socially Debilitating, Economically Unsound. Now Expenditures Many Times Greater For Weapons And Soldiers Were Perfectly Safe. It's A Difference That Still Persists.

There Are Two Kinds Of Forecasters: Those Who Don’t Know, And Those Who Don’t Know They Don’t Know.

It Is Almost As Important To Know What Is Not Serious As To Know What Is.

A Nuclear War Does Not Defend A Country And It Does Not Defend A System. I've Put It The Same Way Many Times; Not Even The Most Accomplished Ideologue Will Be Able To Tell The Difference Between The Ashes Of Capitalism And The Ashes Of Communism.

The Conspicuously Wealthy Turn Up Urging The Character Building Values Of The Privation Of The Poor.

In The World Of Minor Lunacy The Behaviour Of Both The Utterly Rational And The Totally Insane Seems Equally Odd.

The Conventional View Serves To Protect Us From The Painful Job Of Thinking.

The Income Men Derive From Producing Things Of Slight Consequence Is Of Great Consequence. The Production Reflects The Low Marginal Utility Of The Goods To Society. The Income Reflects The High Total Utility Of A Livelihood To A Person.

In All Life One Should Comfort The Afflicted, But Verily, Also, One Should Afflict The Comfortable, And Especially When They Are Comfortably, Contentedly, Even Happily Wrong.

What Was Needed Was A Policy That Increased The Supply Of Money Available For Use And Then Ensured Its Use. Then The State Of Trade Would Have To Improve.

Speeches In Our Culture Are The Vacuum That Fills A Vacuum.

We Talk Of The Enormous Virtues Of Work, But It Turns Out That That Is Mostly For The Poor. If You're Rich Enough Or If You're A College Professor, The Virtue Lies In Leisure And The Use You Make Of Your Leisure Time.

One Of The Little-celebrated Powers Of Presidents (and Other High Government Officials) Is To Listen To Their Critics With Just Enough Sympathy To Ensure Their Silence.

It Takes Some Skill To Spoil A Breakfast - Even The English Can't Do It.

The More Underdeveloped The Country, The More Overdeveloped The Women.

In All Modern Depressions, Recessions, Or Growth-correction, As Variously They Are Called, We Never Miss The Goods That Are Not Produced. We Miss Only The Opportunities For The Labour - For The Jobs - That Are Not Provided.

These Are The Days When Men Of All Social Disciplines And All Political Faiths Seek The Comfortable And The Accepted; When The Man Of Controversy Is Looked Upon As A Disturbing Influence; When Originality Is Taken To Be A Mark Of Instability; And When, In Minor Modification Of The Original Parable, The Bland Lead The Bland.

There Are A Significant Number Of Learned Men And Women Who Hold That Any Successful Effort To Make Ideas Lively, Intelligible And Interesting Is A Manifestation Of Deficient Scholarship. This Is The Fortress Behind Which The Minimally Coherent Regularly Find Refuge.

A More Important Antidote To American Democracy Is American Gerontocracy. The Positions Of Eminence And Authority In Congress Are Allotted In Accordance With Length Of Service, Regardless Of Quality.

No Ethic Is As Ethical As The Work Ethic.

I Would Put Primary Emphasis On A Good Standard Of Living Equitably Distributed. It Can't Be Equal, But One That Eliminates The Terrible Cruelty Of Poverty.

The Size Of General Motors Is In The Service Not Of Monopoly Or The Economies Of Scale But Of Planning.

The Sense Of Responsibility In The Financial Community For The Community As A Whole Is Not Small. It Is Nearly Nil.

All, The Intelligent And Stupid, Diligent And Idle, Have Been Swept Along On A Current Of Increased Output That, In The Usual Case, Owed Nothing Whatever To Their Efforts.

Genius Is A Rising Stock Market.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt And J.f Kennedy Were Presidents In Very Different Times.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

There Is Wonder And A Certain Wicked Pleasure In These Giddy Ascents And Terrible Falls, Especially As They Happen To Other People.

I Think The Role Of The Federal Reserve Is Enormously Exaggerated.

Federal Reserve

Over The Span Of Man's History, Although A Phenomenal Amount Of Education, Persuasion, Indoctrination And Incantation Have Been Devoted To The Effort, Ordinary People Have Never Been Quite Persuaded That Toil Is As Agreeable As Its Alternatives. Thus To Take Increased Well-being Partly In The Form Of More Goods And Partly In The Form Of More Leisure Is Unquestionably Rational.

In The Affluent Society, No Useful Distinction Can Be Made Between Luxuries And Necessities.

I Have Never Understood Why One's Affections Must Be Confined, As Once With Women, To A Single Country.

The Huge Capacity To Purchase Submission That Goes With Any Large Sum Of Money, Well, This We Have. This Is A Power Of Which We Should All Be Aware.

No Society Ever Seems To Have Succumbed To Boredom. Man Has Developed An Obvious Capacity For Surviving The Pompous Reiteration Of The Commonplace.

Had The Bible Been In Clear Straightforward Language, Had The Ambiguities And Contradictions Been Edited Out, And Had The Language Been Constantly Modernised To Accord With Contemporary Taste It Would Almost Certainly Have Been, Or Become, A Work Of Lesser Influence.

In Public Administration Good Sense Would Seem To Require That Public Expectation Be Kept At The Lowest Possible Level In Order To Minimize Eventual Disappointment.

Nothing So Denies A Person Liberty As The Total Absence Of Money.

Politics Is The Art Of Choosing Between The Disastrous And The Unpalatable.

If You Get A Reputation For Being Honest, You Have 95 Percent Of The Competition Already Beat.

Writing Is A Long And Lonesome Business; Back Of The Problems In Thought And Composition Hover Always The Awful Questions: Is This The Page That Shows The Empty Shell? Is It Here And Now That They Find Me Out?

It Is A Far, Far Better Thing To Have A Firm Anchor In Nonsense Than To Put Out On The Troubled Seas Of Thought.

There Is An Old Saying, Or Should Be, That It Is A Wise Economist Who Recognizes The Scope Of His Own Generalizations.

What Is Called A High Standard Of Living Consists, In Considerable Measure, In Arrangements For Avoiding Muscular Energy, For Increasing Sensual Pleasure And Enhancing Caloric Intake Above Any Conceivable Nutritional Requirement.

There Are Times In Politics When You Must Be On The Right Side And Lose.

People Of Privilege Will Always Risk Their Complete Destruction Rather Than Surrender Any Material Part Of Their Advantage.

I Feel Very Angry When I Think Of Brilliant, Or Even Interesting, Women Whose Minds Are Wasted On A Home. Better Have An Affair. It Isn't Permanent And You Keep Your Job.

Perhaps Never Before Or Since Have So Many People Taken The Measure Of Economic Prospects And Found Them So Favorable As In The Two Days Following The Thursday [24th October 1929] Disaster.

In Economics, Hope And Faith Coexist With Great Scientific Pretension And Also A Deep Desire For Respectability.

No One Was Responsible For The Great Wall Street Crash. No One Engineered The Speculation That Preceded It. Both Were The Product Of Free Choice And Decision Of Hundreds Of Thousands Of Individuals.

Change Comes Not From Men And Women Changing Their Minds, But From The Change From One Generation To The Next.

The Great Dialectic In Our Time Is Not, As Anciently And By Some Still Supposed, Between Capital And Labor; It Is Between Economic Enterprise And The State.

[franklin Delano] Roosevelt Was The Central World Figure In The Two Great Disasters Of This Century - The Great Depression And World War Ii. By Contrast, Jfk Came In Relatively Peaceful, Agreeable Times.

Some Years, Like Some Poets,and Politicians And Some Lovely Women, Are Singled Out For Fame Far Beyond The Common Lot, And 1929 Was Clearly Such A Year.

The Real Accomplishment Of Modern Science And Technology Consists In Taking Ordinary Men, Informing Them Narrowly And Deeply And Then, Through Appropriate Organization, Arranging To Have Their Knowledge Combined With That Of Other Specialized But Equally Ordinary Men. This Dispenses With The Need For Genius. The Resulting Performance, Though Less Inspiring, Is Far More Predictable.

Technology, Under All Circumstances, Leads To Planning; In Its Higher Manifestations It May Put The Problems Of Planning Beyond The Reach Of The Industrial Firm. Technological Compulsions, And Not Ideology Or Political Will, Will Require The Firm To Seek The Help And Protection Of The State.

The Inborn Instability Of Capitalism Has Been Part Of The History Of The System For Several Hundred Years.

Private Enterprise Did Not Get Us Atomic Energy.

I Am For A Close Global Association In Trade And Financial Matters, Rather Than The Opposite Possibility Of Excessive Nationalism, As Manifested In The Two World Wars.

Authorship Of Any Sort Is A Fantastic Indulgence Of The Ego.

Both We And The Soviets Face The Common Threat Of Nuclear Destruction And There Is No Likelihood That Either Capitalism Or Communism Will Survive A Nuclear War.

I Am Not Quite Sure What The Advantage Is In Having A Few More Dollars To Spend If The Air Is Too Dirty To Breathe, The Water Too Polluted To Drink, The Commuters Are Losing Out In The Struggle To Get In And Out Of The City, The Streets Are Filthy, And The Schools So Bad That The Young Perhaps Wisely Stay Away, And The Hoodlums Roll Citizens For Some Of The Dollars They Saved In The Tax Cut.

Technology Means The Systematic Application Of Scientific Or Other Organized Knowledge To Practical Tasks.

The Overall Effect Of The Rise Of The Industrial System Is Greatly To Reduce The Union As A Social Force. But It Will Not Disappear Or Become Entirely Unimportant.

One Can Relish The Varied Idiocy Of Human Action During A Panic To The Full, For, While It Is A Time Of Great Tragedy, Nothing Is Being Lost But Money.

If It Is Dangerous To Suppose That Government Is Always Right, It Will Sooner Or Later Be Awkward For Public Administration If Most People Suppose That It Is Always Wrong.

In 1736, Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette Printed An Apology For Its Irregular Appearence Because Its Printer Was "with The Press, Labouring For The Publick Good, To Make Money More Plentiful." The Press Was Busy Printing Money.

For The Sake Of The Progressive, I Will Say That [robert] La Follette Was Relevant, But He Was The Last.

The Urge To Consume Is Fathered By The Value System Which Emphasizes The Ability Of The Society To Produce.

This Is A World Inhabited Not By People Who Have To Be Persuaded To Believe But By People Who Want An Excuse To Believe.

In Economics, The Majority Is Always Wrong.

Talk Of Revolution Is One Of Avoiding Reality.

Meetings Are Indispensable When You Don't Want To Do Anything.

Of Late I Have Searched Diligently To Discover The Advantages Of Age, And There Is, I Have Concluded, Only One. It Is That Lovely Women Treat Your Approaches With Understanding Rather Than With Disdain.

In The Autumn Of 1929 The Mightiest Of Americans Were, For A Brief Time, Revealed As Human Beings.

No Nice Philosophical Point Has Ever Been So Decisively Resolved As This: That Those Who Are Not Conceived Do Not Miss The Pleasure Of Consuming The Goods They Do Not Get Born To Enjoy.

The Study Of Money, Above All Other Fields In Economics, Is One In Which Complexity Is Used To Disguise Truth Or To Evade Truth, Not To Reveal It. The Process By Which Banks Create Money Is So Simple The Mind Is Repelled.

The Industrial System Requires That Prices Be Under Effective Control. And It Seeks The Greatest Possible Influence Over What Buyers Take At The Established Prices.

Only Men Of Considerable Vanity Write Books; Consistently Therewith, I Worried Lest The World Were Exchanging An Irreplaceable Author For A More Easily Purchased Diplomat.

All Successful Revolutions Are The Kicking In Of A Rotten Door.

The Masters Thought They Were Loved Until One Day One Of Their Favorites Farted Loudly While Serving Dinner And The Next Day Was Gone. The Very First Manifestation Of The Classless Society Is The Disappearance Of The Servant Class.

If We Were Not In Vietnam, All That Part Of The World Would Be Enjoying The Obscurity It So Richly Deserves.

If Inheritance Qualifies One For Office, Intelligence Cannot Be A Requirement.

Even In Such A Time Of Madness As The Late Twenties, A Great Many Man In Wall Street Remained Quite Sane. But They Also Remained Very Quiet. The Sense Of Responsibility In The Financial Community For The Community As A Whole Is Not Small. It Is Nearly Nil. Perhaps This Is Inherent. In A Community Where The Primary Concern Is Making Money, One Of The Necessary Rules Is To Live And Let Live. To Speak Out Against Madness May Be To Ruin Those Who Have Succumbed To It. So The Wise In Wall Street Are Nearly Always Silent. The Foolish Thus Have The Field To Themselves. None Rebukes Them.

The Myth That Holds That The Great Corporation Is The Puppet Of The Market, The Powerless Servant Of The Consumer, Is, In Fact One Of The Devices By Which Its Power Is Perpetuated.

It Is My Guiding Confession That I Believe The Greatest Error In Economics Is In Seeing The Economy As A Stable, Immutable Structure.

I've Been A Faithful Reader Of The Great Classical Documents Of Economics, Or Tried To Be.

Superficial Observers Have Long Criticized The United States For Making A Fetish Of Youth. This Is Unfair. Uniquely Among Modern Organs Of Public And Private Administration, Its National Legislature Rewards Senility.

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.

There Is A Common Tendency To Ignore The Poor Or To Develop Some Rationalisation For The Good Fortune Of The Fortunate.

The Salary Of The Chief Executive Of A Large Corporation Is Not A Market Award For Achievement. It Is Frequently In The Nature Of A Warm Personal Gesture By The Individual To Himself.

Washington Is A Place Where Men Praise Courage And Act On Elaborate Personal Cost-benefit Calculations.

Ralph [ Nader] Is An Old Friend Of Mine, And He Does A Useful Job In Displaying A Position.

Nothing Is So Admirable In Politics As A Short Memory.

Mr. David Stockman Has Said That Supply-side Economics Was Merely A Cover For The Trickle-down Approach To Economic Policy — What An Older And Less Elegant Generation Called The Horse-and-sparrow Theory: If You Feed The Horse Enough Oats, Some Will Pass Through To The Road For The Sparrows.

No Grant Of Feudal Privilege Has Ever Equaled, For Effortless Return, That Of The Grandparent Who Bought And Endowed His Descendants With A Thousand Shares Of General Motors Or General Electric.

Economists Are Economical, Among Other Things, Of Ideas; Most Make Those Of Their Graduate Days Do For A Lifetime.

I Accept The Global Complex And Global Trade More Than Do Some Of My Liberal Colleagues Because I Consider This A Wise Alternative To National Tension And Conflict.

It Is Not Necessary To Advertise Food To Hungry People, Fuel To Cold People, Or Houses To The Homeless.

From The Spring Of 1941, I Controlled All Prices In The United States. You Could Lower A Price Without My Permission, But You Couldn't Raise A Price Without My Permission Or That Of My Staff.

Conscience Is Better Served By A Myth.

Clearly The Most Unfortunate People Are Those Who Must Do The Same Thing Over And Over Again, Every Minute, Or Perhaps Twenty To The Minute. They Deserve The Shortest Hours And The Highest Pay.

Wisdom... Is Often An Abstraction Associated Not With Fact Or Reality But With The Man Who Asserts It And The Manner Of Its Assertion.

The Spirit Should Never Grow Old.

In Any Great Organization It Is Far, Far Safer To Be Wrong With The Majority Than To Be Right Alone.

It's A Rule Worth Having In Mind. Income Almost Always Flows Along The Same Axis As Power But In The Opposite Direction.

Marx Profoundly Affected Those Who Did Not Accept His System. His Influence Extended To Those Who Least Supposed They Were Subject To It.

When People Are Least Sure, They Are Often Most Dogmatic.

The Charge That An Idea Is Radical, Impractical, Or Long- Haired Is Met By Showing That A Prominent Businessman Has Favored It?an Additional Tactic In This Strategy Of Defense?is To Assert That Winston Churchill Once Sponsored The Particular Idea. If One Is Challenged, A Sufficiently Careful Investigation Will Show That He Did.

I Am Worried About Our Tendency To Over Invest In Things And Under Invest In People.

Increasingly In Recent Times We Have Come First To Identify The Remedy That Is Most Agreeable, Most Convenient, Most In Accord With Major Pecuniary Or Political Interest, The One That Reflects Our Available Faculty For Action; Then We Move From The Remedy So Available Or Desired Back To A Cause To Which That Remedy Is Relevant.

Hermann Goering, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Walther Frank, Julius Streicher And Robert Ley Did Pass Under My Inspectionand Interrogation In 1945 But They Only Proved That National Socialism Was A Gangster Interlude At A Rather Low Order Of Mental Capacity And With A Surprisingly High Incidence Of Alcoholism.

One Of The Best Ways Of Avoiding Necessary And Even Urgent Tasks Is To Seem To Be Busily Employed On Things That Are Already Done.

Faced With Having To Change Our Views Or Prove That There Is No Need To Do So, Most Of Us Immediately Get Busy On The Proof.

No Intelligence System Can Predict What A Government Will Do If It Doesn't Know Itself.

Men Have Been Swindled By Other Men On Many Occasions. The Autumn Of 1929 Was, Perhaps, The First Occasion When Men Succeeded On A Large Scale In Swindling Themselves.

Every Corner Of The Public Psyche Is Canvassed By Some Of The Most Talented Citizens To See If The Desire For Some Merchandisable Product Can Be Cultivated.

Of All Classes The Rich Are The Most Noticed And The Least Studied.

There Can Be Few Fields Of Human Endeavor In Which History Counts For So Little As In The World Of Finance.past Experience, To The Extent That It Is Part Of Memory At All, Is Dismissed As The Primitive Refuge Of The Those Who Do Not Have Insight To Appreciate The Incredible Wonders Of The Present.

The Complaints Of The Privileged Are Too Often Confused With The Voice Of The Masses.

I've Become Accustomed To Supporting Politicians Who Are More Conservative Than I Am. This Is Not Entirely A Surprise.

It Takes A Certain Brashness To Attack The Accepted Economic Legendsbut Noneat All Toperpetuatethem. So Theyare Perpetuated.

The Stock Market Is But A Mirror Which Provides An Image Of The Underlying Or Fundamental Economic Situation. Cause And Effect Run From The Economy To The Stock Market, Never The Reverse. In 1929 The Economy Was Headed For Trouble. Eventually That Trouble Was Violently Reflected In Wall Street.

War Remains The Decisive Human Failure.

I Think Without A Doubt, That What Is Called "financial Genius" Is Merely A Rising Market.

In A World Where For Pedagogic And Other Purposes A Very Large Number Of Economists Is Required, An Arrangement Which Discourages Many Of Them From

Were It Part Of Our Everyday Education And Comment That The Corporation Is An Instrument For The Exercise Of Power, That It Belongs To The Process By Which We Are Governed, There Would Then Be Debate On How That Power Is Used And How It Might Be Made Subordinate To The Public Will And Need. This Debate Is Avoided By Propagating The Myth That The Power Does Not Exist.

The American Colonies, All Know, Were Greatly Opposed To Taxation Without Representation. They Were Also, A Less Celebrated Quality, Equally Opposed To Taxation With Representation.

Taxation Without Representation

The Present Age Of Contentment Will Come To An End Only When And If The Adverse Developments That It Fosters Challenge The Sense Of Comfortable Well-being

But Now, As Throughout History, Financial Capacity And Political Perspicacity Are Inversely Correlated.

Money Differs From An Automobile Or Mistress In Being Equally Important To Those Who Have It And Those Who Do Not.

Economic Theory Is The Most Prestigious Subject Of Instruction And Study. Agricultural Economics, Labor Economics And Marketing Are Lower Caste Fields Of Study.

Inventions That Are Not Made, Like Babies That Are Not Born, Are Rarely Missed. In The Absence Of New Developments, Old Ones May Seem Very Impressive For Quite A Long While.

Economic Life, As Always, Is A Matrix In Which Result Becomes Cause And Cause Becomes Result.

When People Put Their Ballots In The Boxes, They Are, By That Act, Inoculated Against The Feeling That The Government Is Not Theirs. They Then Accept, In Some Measure, That Its Errors Are Their Errors, Its Aberrations Their Aberrations, That Any Revolt Will Be Against Them. It's A Remarkably Shrewd And Rather Conservative Arrangement When One Thinks Of It.

Democracies Have

A Very Complicated Mass Of Things Influences The Economy - The Speculative Effect, Government Policy, Consumer Borrowing And Spending, The Level Of Technical Innovation (which I Concede, Although Everyone Emphasizes It Too Much), And Much More - Including, Of Course, The Rate Of Inflation.

Some Things Were Never Meant To Be Recycled.

Some Things Are Meant To Be

American University Presidents Are A Nervous Breed; I Have Never Thought Well Of Them As A Class.

American Universities

In Central Banking As In Diplomacy, Style, Conservative Tailoring, And An Easy Association With The Affluent Count Greatly And Results Far Much Less.

We Shall Have A Race Of Men Who Are Strong On Telemetry And Space Communications But Who Cannot Read Anything But A Blueprint Or Write Anything But A Computer Program.

There Is Little That Can Be Said About Most Economic Goods. A Toothbrush Does Little But Clean Teeth. Aspirin Does Little But Dull Pain. Alcohol Is Important Mostly For Making People More Or Less Drunk ... There Being So Little To Be Said, Much Is To Be Invented.

In The Market Economy The Price That Is Offered Is Counted Upon To Produce The Result That Is Sought.

It Is In The Long Run That The Corporation Lives.

Economics Is A Subject Profoundly Conducive To Cliche, Resonant With Boredom. On Few Topics Is An American Audience So Practiced In Turning Off Its Ears And Minds. And None Can Say That The Response Is Ill Advised.

Inflation Does Not Lubricate Trade But By Rescuing Traders From Their Errors Of Optimism Or Stupidity.

It Has Been The Acknowledged Right Of Every Marxist Scholar To Read Into Marx The Particular Meaning That He Himself Prefers And To Treat All Others With Indignation.

Economics Is Extremely Useful As A Form Of Employment For Economists.

A Businessman Who Reads Business Week Is Lost To Fame. One Who Reads Proust Is Marked For Greatness.

In The Early Days Of The Crash It Was Widely Believed That Jesse L. Livermore, A Bostonian With A Large And Unquestionably Exaggerated Reputation For Bear Operations, Leading A Syndicate That Was Driving The Market Down.

Who Is King In The World Of The Blind When There Isn't Even A One Eyed Man?

The Ideas By Which People . . . Interpret Their Existence And In Measure Guide Their Behavior, Were Not Forged In A World Of Wealth.

There Can Be No Question, However, That Prolonged Commitment To Mathematical Exercises In Economics Can Be Damaging. It Leads To The Atrophy Of Judgement And Intuition. . .

I React Pragmatically. Where The Market Works, I'm For That. Where The Government Is Necessary, I'm For That. I'm Deeply Suspicious Of Somebody Who Says, 'i'm In Favor Of Privatization,' Or, 'i'm Deeply In Favor Of Public Ownership.' I'm In Favor Of Whatever Works In The Particular Case.

A Point Must Be Repeated: Only The Pathological Weakness Of The Financial Memory...allows Us To Believe That The Modern Experience Of....debt...is In Any Way A New Phenomenon.

No Politician Can Praise Unemployment Or Inflation, And There Is No Way Of Combining High Employment With Stable Prices That Does Not Involve Some Control Of Income And Prices. Otherwise The Struggle For More Consumption And More Income To Sustain It-a Struggle That Modern Corporations, Modern Unions And Modern Democracy All Facilitate And Encourage-will Drive Up Prices. Only Heavy Unemployment Will Then Temper This Upward Thrust. Not Many Wish To Confront The Truth That The Modern Economy Gives A Choice Only Between Inflation, Unemployment, Or Controls.

In The United States, Though Power Corrupts, The Expectation Of Power Paralyzes.

There Is An Insistent Tendency Among Serious Social Scientists To Think Of Any Institution Which Features Rhymed And Singing Commercials, Intense And Lachrymose Voices Urging Highly Improbable Enjoyment, Caricatures Of The Human Esophagus In Normal And Impaired Operation, And Which Hints Implausibly At Opportunities For Antiseptic Seduction As Inherently Trivial. This Is A Great Mistake. The Industrial System Is Profoundly Dependent On Commercial Television And Could Not Exist In Its Present Form Without It.

Pundits Forecast Not Because They Know, But Because They Are Asked.

It Is The Good Fortune Of The Affluent Country That The Opportunity Cost Of Economic Discussion Is Low And Hence It Can Afford All Kinds.

However, It Is Safe To Say That At The Peak In 1929 The Number Of Active Speculators Was Less - And Probably Was Much Less - Than A Million.

By All But The Pathologically Romantic, It Is Now Recognized That This Is Not The Age Of The Small Man.

Simple Minds, Presumably, Are The Easiest To Manage.

The Genius Of The Industrial System Lies In Its Organized Use Of Capital And Technology. This Is Made Possible, As We Have Duly Seen, By Extensively Replacing The Market With Planning.

Economics Exists To Make Astrology Look Respectable.

That One Never Need To Look Beyond The Love Of Money For Explanation Of Human Behavior Is One Of The Most Jealously Guarded Simplification Of Our Culture.

When Everything Else Failed, We Can Still Become Immortal By Making An Enormous Blunder.

Of All The Weapons In The Federal Reserve Arsenal, Words Were The The Most Unpredictable In Their Consequences.

Federal Reserve

Those Days [of The Vietnam War] You Couldn't Get On A Bus Going To The South Without Expecting A Riot Over Something Or The Other. All Of That Has Disappeared Thanks To Lyndon Johnson.

Power Is As Power Does.

While It Will Be Desirable To Achieve Planned Results, It Will Be Even More Important To Avoid Unplanned Disasters.

Smoking Dope And Hanging Up Che's Picture Is No More A Commitment Than Drinking Milk And Collecting Postage Stamps. A Revolution In Consciousness Is An Empty High Without A Revolution In The Distribution Of Power.

Educators Have Yet To Realize How Deeply The Industrial System Is Dependent Upon Them.

In Fact, The Wage-price Spiral Is The Functional Counterpart Of Unemployment. The Latter Occurs When There Is Insufficient Demand; The Spiral Operates When There Is Too Much And Also,unfortunately, When There Is Just Enough.

Agriculture Is One Economic Activity That Does Not Obey The Laws Of Demand And Supply.

The Senate Has Unlimited Debate; In The House, Debate Is Ruthlessly Circumscribed. There Is Frequent Discussion As To Which Technique Most Effectively Frustrates Democratic Process.

To Add To The Technostructure Is To Increase Its Power In The Enterprise.

Economic Stimulation That Works Through The Increased Outlays To The Affluent Has, Inevitably, An Aspect Of Soundness And Sanity That Is Lacking In Expenditure On Behalf Of The Undeserving Poor.

There Is Certainly No Absolute Standard Of Beauty. That Precisely Is What Makes Its Pursuit So Interesting.

The Privileged Have Regularly Invited Their Own Destruction With Their Greed.

The Line Dividing The State From What Is Called Private Enterprise, Orat Least Fromthehighlyorganized Part Of It, Is A Traditional Fiction.

But It Can Be Laid Down As A Rule That Those Who Speak Most Of Liberty Are Least Inclined To Use It.

No Hungry Man Who Is Also Sober Can Be Persuaded To Use His Last Dollar For Anything But Food.

Things That Come From The Private Sector Are In Abundant Supply; Things That Depend On The Public Sector Are Widely A Problem. We're A World, As I Said In The Affluent Society, Of Filthy Streets And Clean Houses, Poor Schools And Expensive Television.

Truth Has Anciently Been Called The First Casualty Of War. Money May, In Fact, Have Priority.

Ideas Are Inherently Conservative. They Yield Not To The Attack Of Other Ideas But To The Massive Onslaught Of Circumstance With Which They Cannot Contend.

The Threat To Men Of Great Dignity, Privilege And Pretense Is Not From The Radicals They Revile; It Is From Accepting Their Own Myth. Exposure To Reality Remains The Nemesis Of The Great -- A Little Understood Thing.

If You Feed Enough Oats To The Horse, Some Will Pass Through To Feed The Sparrows (referring To "trickle Down" Economics).

I Begin With The Renaming Of The System. It Used To Be Capitalism. But That Evokes [karl] Marx And [john] Rockefeller. So Now We Speak Of The Market System. That Is A Nice Bland Expression, Which Forgets Those Off-color References.

Do Not Be Alarmed By Simplification, Complexity Is Often A Device For Claiming Sophistication, Or For Evading Simple Truths.

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.

Security Guards

Among All The World's Races, Some Obscure Bedouin Tribes Possibly Apart, Americans Are The Most Prone To Misinformation. This Is Not The Consequence Of Any Special Preference For Mendacity, Although At The Higher Levels Of Their Public Administration That Tendency Is Impressive. It Is Rather That So Much Of What They Themselves Believe Is Wrong.

In The Conventional Wisdom Of Conservatives, The Modern Search For Security Is Regularly Billed As The Greatest Single Threat To Economic Progress.

The Questions That Are Beyond The Reach Of Economics-the Beauty, Dignity, Pleasure And Durability Of Life-may Be Inconvenient But They Are Important.

People Are The Common Denominator Of Progress; No Improvement Is Possible With Unimproved People.

The Miserable Consumption Of The Poor Is Partly The Result Of The Ostentatious Demands Of The Rich. There Isn't Enough For Both, And The Latter Get Far More Than They Need...but Could Anything Seriously Be Done About It?

Ideas Do Not Respect National Frontiers, And This Is Especially So Where Language And Other Traditions Are In Common.

The Shortcomings Of Economics Are Not Original Error But Uncorrected Obsolescence. The Obsolescence Has Occurred Because What Is Convenient Has Become Sacrosanct. Anyone Who Attacks Such Ideas Must Seem To Be A Trifle Self-confident And Even Aggressive. The Man Who Makes His Entry By Leaning Against An Infirm Door Gets An Unjustified Reputation For Violence. Something Is To Be Attributed To The Poor State Of The Door.

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Aleister Crowley

Francesca Annis

Lyndon B. Johnson

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