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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.

-John Kenneth Galbraith

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World War Ii Revealed

John Kenneth Galbraith

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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.

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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?

Power Is Not Something That Can Be Assumed Or Discarded At Will Like Underwear.

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

Agreeable As It Is To Know Where One Is Proceeding, It Is Far More Important To Know Where One Has Arrived.

No Solution [to The Problem Of Poverty] Is So Effective As Providing Income To The Poor. Whether In The Form Of Food, Housing, Health Services, Education Or Money, Income Is An Excellent Antidote For Deprivation. No Truth Has Spawned So Much Ingenious Evasion.

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

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.

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

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.

Happiness Does Not Require An Expanding Economy

Because Of His Compassion Owen Was Always In Trouble With His Partners. They Would Have Much Preferred A Tough, Down-to-earth Manager Who Would Get A Days Work Out Of The Little Bastards.

Ideas May Be Superior To Vested Interest. They Are Also Very Often The Children Of Vested Interest.

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.

[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.

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

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.

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.

The Traveler To The United States Will Do Wellto Prepare Himself For The Class-consciousness Of The Natives. This Differs From The Already Familiar English Version In Being More Extreme And Based More Firmly On The Conviction That The Class To Which The Speaker Belongs Is Inherently Superior To All Others.

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.

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

In A Community Where Public Services Have Failed To Keep Abreast Of Private Consumption Things Are Very Different. Here, In An Atmosphere Of Private Opulence And Public Squalor, The Private Goods Have Full Sway.

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.

The Modern Corporation Must Manufacture Not Only Goods But The Desire For The Goods It Manufactures.

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

Nothing So Weakens Government As Persistent Inflation.

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

Banking May Well Be A Career From Which No Man Really Recovers.

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

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

Few Can Believe That Suffering, Especially By Others, Is In Vain. Anything That Is Disagreeable Must Surely Have Beneficial Economic Effects.

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.

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

Federal Reserve

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.

If You're Rich You Can Buy Books. If You're Poor, You Need A Library.

The First Goal Of The Technostructure Is Its Own Security.

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

People Are The Common Denominator Of Progress. So No Improvement Is Possible With Unimproved People, And Advance Is Certain When People Are Liberated And Educated. It Would Be Wrong To Dismiss The Importance Of Roads, Railroads, Power Plants, Mills,and The Other Familiar Furniture Of Economic Development. But We Are Coming To Realize That There Is A Certain Sterility In Economic Monuments That Stand Alone In A Sea Of Illiteracy. Conquest Of Illiteracy Comes First.

The Problem Of The Modern Economy Is Not A Failure Of A Knowledge Of Economics; It's A Failure Of A Knowledge Of History.

In Recent Times No Problem Has Been More Puzzling To Thoughtful People Than Why, In A Troubled World, We Make Such Poor Use Of Our Affluence.

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

We Have A Swarm Of People In The Stock Market - Not Out Of Knowledge, Not Out Of Expectation, But Out Of Basically A Gambling Instinct, The Hope That Prices Will Go Up.

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

The Notion Of A Formal Structure Of Command Must Be Abandoned. It Is More Useful To Think Of The Mature Corporation As A Series Of Concentric Circles.

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?

Foresight Is An Imperfect Thing - All Prevision In Economics Is Imperfect.

Imperfect Things

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

In Europe And The United States The Two Decades Following The Second World War Will For Long Be Remembered As A Very Good Time, The Time When Capitalism Really Worked. Everywhere In The Industrialized Countries Production Increased. Unemployment Was Everywhere Low. Prices Were Nearly Stable. When Production Lagged And Unemployment Rose, Governments Intervened To Take Up The Slack, As Keynes Had Urged.

Meetings Are Held Because Men Seek Companionship Or, At A Minimum, Wish To Escape The Tedium Of Solitary Duties. They Yearn For The Prestige Which Accrues To The Man Who Presides Over Meetings, And This Leads Them To Convoke Assemblages Over Which They Can Preside. Finally, There Is The Meeting Which Is Called Not Because There Is Business To Be Done, But Because It Is Necessary To Create The Impression That Business Is Being Done. Such Meetings Are More Than A Substitute For Action. They Are Widely Regarded As Action.

Emancipation Of Belief Is The Most Formidable Of The Tasks Of Reform And The One On Which All Else Depends.

The Man Who Is Admired For The Ingenuity Of His Larceny Is Almost Always Rediscovering Some Earlier Form Of Fraud. The Basic Forms Are All Known, Have All Been Practiced. The Manners Of Capitalism Improve. The Morals May Not.

Originality Is Something That Is Easily Exaggerated, Especially By Authors Contemplating Their Own Work.

The Spirit Should Never Grow Old.

One Must Always Have In Mind One Simple Fact - There Is No Literate Population In The World That Is Poor, And There Is No Illiterate Population That Is Anything But Poor.

In The Usual (though Certainly Not In Every) Public Decision On Economic Policy, The Choice Is Between Courses That Are Almost Equally Good Or Equally Bad. It Is The Narrowest Decisions That Are Most Ardently Debated. If The World Is Lucky Enough To Enjoy Peace, It May Even One Day Make The Discovery, To The Horror Of Doctrinaire Free-enterprisers And Doctrinaire Planners Alike, That What Is Called Capitalism And What Is Called Socialism Are Both Capable Of Working Quite Well.

All Crises Have Involved Debt That, In One Fashion Or Another, Has Become Dangerously Out Of Scale In Relation To The Underlying Means Of Payment.

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

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.

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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.

Men Are, In Fact, Either Sustained By Organization Or They Sustain Organization.

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

Wealth, In Even The Most Improbable Cases, Manages To Convey The Aspect Of Intelligence.

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The Greater The Wealth The Thicker Will Be The Dirt.

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.

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

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

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

In Economics It Is A Far, Far Wiser Thing To Be Right Than To Be Consistent

Partly, The Russian System Succeeds Because, In Contrast To The Western Industrial Economies, It Makes Full Use Of Its Manpower.

Nothing Is More Portable Than Rich People And Their Money

[the] Men Of The Technostructure Are The New And Universal Priesthood. Their Religion Is Business Success; Their Test Of Virtue Is Growth And Profit. Their Bible Is The Computer Printout; Their Communion Bench Is The Committee Room.

In The Usual (though Certainly Not In Every) Public Decision On Economic Policy, The Choice Is Between Courses That Are Almost Equally Good Or Equally Bad. It Is The Narrowest Decisions That Are Most Ardently Debated.

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

The Inborn Instability Of Capitalism Has Been Part Of The History Of The System For Several Hundred Years, Including Recurrent Speculative Episodes. There Should Be No Doubt In Anyone's Mind That We're Now Having Another One Of Those Speculative Episodes.

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.

Faced With The Choice Between Changing One's Mind And Proving That There Is No Need To Do So, Almost Everyone Gets Busy On The Proof.

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

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

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

A Bad Book Is The Worse That It Cannot Repent. It Has Not Been The Devil's Policy To Keep The Masses Of Mankind In Ignorance; But Finding That They Will Read, He Is Doing All In His Power To Poison Their Books.

I Do The Best With What Exists.

The Drive Toward Complex Technical Achievement Offers A Clue To Why The U.s. Is Good At Space Gadgetry And Bad At Slum Problems.

All Successful Revolutions Are The Kicking In Of A Rotten Door. The Violence Of Revolutions Is The Violence Of Men Who Charge Into A Vacuum.

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

If A Man Didn't Make Sense, The Scotch Felt It Was Misplaced Politeness To Try To Keep Him From Knowing It. Better That He Be Aware Of His Reputation, For This Would Encourage Reticence Which Goes Well With Stupidity.

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

Consumer Wants Can Have Bizarre, Frivolous, Or Even Immoral Origins, And An Admirable Case Can Still Be Made For A Society That Seeks To Satisfy Them. But The Case Cannot Stand If It Is The Process Of Satisfying Wants That Create The Wants.

It Had Been Held That The Economic System, Any Capitalist System, Found Its Equilibrium At Full Employment. Left To Itself, It Was Thus That It Came To Rest. Idle Men And Idle Plant Were An Aberration, A Wholly Temporary Failing. Keynes Showed That The Modern Economy Could As Well Find Its Equilibrium With Continuing, Serious Unemployment. Its Perfectly Normal Tendency Was To What Economists Have Since Come To Call An Underemployment Equilibrium.

Perfectly Normal

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.

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

Federal Reserve

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.

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.

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.

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

Oligopoly Is An Imperfect Monopoly. Like The Despotism Of The Dual Monarchy, It Is Saved Only By Its Incompetence.

It Is Not The Individual's Right To Buy That Is Being Protected. Rather, It Is The Seller's Right To Manage The Individual.

Almost Every Aspect Of Its (federal Reserve) History Should Be Approached With A Discriminating Disregard For What Is Commonly Taught Or Believed.

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

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.

Milton Friedman’s Misfortune Is That His Economic Policies Have Been Tried.

Few Economic Problems, If Any, Are Difficult Of Solution. The Difficulty, All But Invariably, Is In Confronting Them. We Know What Needs To Be Done; For Reasons Of Inertia, Pecuniary Interest, Passion Or Ignorance, We Do Not Wish To Say So.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It Is A Well Known And Very Important Fact That America's Founding Fathers Did Not Like Taxation Without Representation. It Is A Lesser Known And Equally Important Fact That They Did Not Much Like Taxation With Representation.

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

I Was Brought Up In Southwestern Ontario Where We Were Taught That Canadian Patriotism Should Not Withstand Anything More Than A Five-dollar-a-month Wage Differential. Anything More Than That And You Went To Detroit.

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.

All Of The Great Leaders Have Had One Characteristic In Common: It Was The Willingness To Confront Unequivocally The Major Anxiety Of Their People In Their Time. This, And Not Much Else, Is The Essence Of Leadership.

Money Is A Singular Thing. It Ranks With Love As Man's Greatest Source Of Joy. And With Death As His Greatest Source Of Anxiety. Over All History It Has Oppressed Nearly All People In One Of Two Ways: Either It Has Been Abundant And Very Unreliable, Or Reliable And Very Scarce.

A Good Rule Of Conversation Is Never Answer A Foolish Question.

In Numerous Years Following The War, The Federal Government Ran A Heavy Surplus. It Could Not (however) Pay Off Its Debt, Retire Its Securities, Because To Do So Meant There Would Be No Bonds To Back The National Bank Notes. To Pay Off The Debt Was To Destroy The Money Supply.

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.

The Enemy Of The Conventional Wisdom Is Not Ideas But The March Of Events.

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

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.

In 1929 The Discovery Of The Wonders Of The Geometric Series Struck Wall Street With A Force Comparable To The Invention Of The Wheel.

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

The Individual Serves The Planning System Not By Supplying It With Savings And The Resulting Capital; He Serves It Far More By Consuming Its Products.

Few Things Are As Immutable As The Addiction Of Political Groups To The Ideas By Whichthey Have Once Won Office.

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.

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.

In Economics, Unlike Fiction And The Theater, There Is No Harm In A Premature Disclosure Of The Plot: It Is To See The Changes Just Mentioned And Others As An Interlocked Whole.

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.

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.

If We Are Concerned About Our Great Appetite For Materials, It Is Plausible To Decrease Waste, To Make Better Use Of Stocks Available, And To Develop Substitutes. But What About The Appetite Itself? The Major Cause Of The Continued Deterioration Of The Global Environment Is The Unsustainable Pattern Of Consumption And Production, Particularly In Industrialised Countries

I've Long Believed Alas, That In Highly Organized Industrial Societies, Capitalist Or Socialist, The Stronger Tendency Is To Converge - That If Steel Or Automobiles Are Wanted And Must Be Made On A Large Scale, The Process Will Stamp Its Imprint On The Society, Whether That Me Be Magnitogorsk Or Gary, Indiana.

There's A Certain Part Of The Contented Majority Who Love Anybody Who Is Worth A Billion Dollars.

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

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

The Family Which Takes It Mauve And Cerise, Air Conditioned, Power-steered, And Power Braked Automobile Out For A Tour Passes Through Cities That Are Badly Paved, Made Hideous By Litter, Blighted Buildings, Billboards, And Posts For Wires That Should Long Since Have Been Put Underground.

We're All Subject To The Daily Pressures Of Consumer Persuasion.

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

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.

Broadly Speaking, Keynesianism Means That The Government Has A Specific Responsibility For The Behavior Of The Economy, That It Doesn't Work On Its Own Autonomous Course, But The Government, When There's A Recession, Compensates By Employment, By Expansion Of Purchasing Power, And In Boom Times Corrects By Being A Restraining Force. But It Controls The Great Flow Of Demand Into The Economy, What Since Keynesian Times Has Been The Flow Of Aggregate Demand. That Was The Basic Idea Of Keynes So Far As One Can Put It In A Couple Of Sentences.

If Anything Is Evident About People Who Manage Money, It Is That The Task Attracts A Very Low Level Of Talent, One That Is Protected In Its Highly Imperfect Profession By The Mystery That Is Thought To Enfold The Subject Of Economics In General And Of Money In Particular.

Power Is As Power Does.

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

Economists, On The Whole, Think Well Of What They Do Themselves And Much Less Well Of What Their Professional Colleagues Do.

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.

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

When You See Reference To A New Paradigm You Should Always, Under All Circumstances, Take Cover.

Preservationists Are The Only People In The World Who Are Invariably Confirmed In Their Wisdom After The Fact.

A Drastic Reduction In Weapons Competition Following A General Release From The Commitment To The Cold War Would Be Sharply In Conflict With The Needs Of The Industrial System.

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

Genius Is A Rising Stock Market.

Unemployment Is Rarely Considered Desirable Except By Those Who Have Not Experienced It.

War Remains The Decisive Human Failure.

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

The Contented And Economically Comfortable Have A Very Discriminating View Of Government. Nobody Is Ever Indignant About Bailing Out Failed Banks And Failed Savings And Loans Associations... But When Taxes Must Be Paid For The Lower Middle Class And Poor, The Government Assumes An Aspect Of Wickedness.

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

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

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.

There Are Days When The Result Is So Bad That No Fewer Than Five Revisions Are Required. In Contrast, When I'm Greatly Inspired, Only Four Revisions Are Needed.

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

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.

Clerks In Downtown Hotels Were Said To Be Asking Guests Whether They Wished The Room For Sleeping Or Jumping. Two Men Jumped Hand-in-hand From A High Window In The Ritz. They Had A Joint Account.

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

The Notion That You Would Initiate A New Product Without Preparing The Way By Persuasion And Advertising And Salesmanship Is Fantastic. It's An Integral Part Of The System.

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.

The Accepted Ideas Of Any Period Are Singularly Those That Serve The Dominant Economic Interest...what Economists Believe And Teach, Whether In The United States Or In The Soviet Union, Is Rarely Hostile To The Institutions - The Private Business Enterprise, The Communist Party - That Reflect The Dominant Economic Power. Not To Notice This Takes Effort, Although Many Succeed.

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.

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

One Of My Greatest Pleasures In My Writing Has Come From The Thought That Perhaps My Work Might Annoy Someone Of Comfortably Pretentious Position. Then Comes The Realization That Such People Rarely Read.

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

It Was Not Hard To Persuade People That The Market Was Sound; As Always In Such Times They Asked Only That The Dispiriting Voices Of Doubt Be Muted And That There Should Be Tolerably Frequent Expressions Of Confidence.

Foreign Policy Is Conducted For The Convenience And Enjoyment Of People In Washington.

There Is Something Wonderful In Seeing A Wrong-headed Majority Assailed By Truth.

I Write With Two Things In Mind. I Want To Be Right With My Fellow Economists. After All, I've Made My Life As A Professional Economist, So I'm Careful That My Economics Is As It Should Be. But I Have Long Felt That There's No Economic Proposition That Can't Be Stated In Clear, Accessible Language. So I Try To Be Right With My Fellow Economists, But I Try To Have An Audience Of Any Interested, Intelligent Person.

In The Old Days, Land Was Important As The Giver Of All Things. That Period Is Gone Now. Technology And Brainpower Are All That Matters And Yet Conflicts Over Land, Specially One Like On The India-china Border, That Yields Nothing, Continue. This Is A Burden Of Ancient History That We Continue To Carry. If Tomorrow There Is Settlement On Planet Mars, We Will Begin To Worry If Others Are Interested.

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.

Man, At Least When Educated, Is A Pessimist. He Believes It Safer Not To Reflect On His Achievements; Jove Is Known To Strike Such People Down.

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

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

I've Been Writing A Book Called The Economics Of Innocent Fraud. I Published Part Of It Already In The Progressive ("free Market Fraud," January 1999). But I've Been Interrupted These Last Few Months. It Deals With All Of The Things We Do, In An Innocent Way, To Cover Up The Truth.

Private Enterprise Did Not Get Us Atomic Energy.

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

The Massive Reduction In Risk That Is Inherent In The Development Of The Modern Corporation Has Been Far From Fully Appreciated.

Nothing Is So Admirable In Politics As A Short Memory.

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

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

Modesty Is A Vastly Overrated Virtue.

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 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.

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.

No Ethic Is As Ethical As The Work Ethic.

There Is An Enormous Thrust In Our Time To Have A Simple Answer. And That Simple Answer Is That All Depends On Alan Greenspan And The Federal Reserve. And Alan, Who Is An Old Acquaintance Of Mine, Is A Marvelous Performer In The Impression He Gives Of Enormously Great Perception.

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

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

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.

Of All The Mysteries Of The Stock Exchange There Is None So Impenetrable As Why There Should Be A Buyer For Everyone Who Seeks To Sell.

The Commencement Speech Is Not, I Think, A Wholly Satisfactory Manifestation Of Our Culture.

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Samuel Rutherford

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