For all except the very few of extraordinary gifts, the spur of gain is not only powerful, it is indispensable.
Yves Guyot, stating what he called “the third incentive of human action,” in Where and why Public Ownership Has Failed (H. F. Baker, trans., 1914), p. 424.
Illustration is a detail from a caricature by artist André Gill (1840-1885).
On September 3, 1914, Dixy Lee Ray was born. Her stint as governor of the State of Washington was a controversial one, as she economized in startling ways, and proved largely unsympathetic to environmentalist politics. Indeed, she later wrote Trashing the Planet, which took on trendy “solutions” to environmental problems, based in no small part on her own experience and perspective as a scientist. She was an early critic of the developing “global warming” pseudo-“consensus.”
You may remember Andrew Heaton playing a character on Fox Business’s The Independents of a few years ago. Or for his EconPop podcasts. Or for stuff like this:
September 2 marks the 1839 birth of American economist and reformer Henry George. George is most famous for his 1879 treatise, Progress and Poverty, but made many other contributions, including advocacy of the secret ballot and his able economic policy polemic Protection or Free Trade (1886).
Slovakia celebrates a Constitution Day on September 1, for the Constitution passed by the Slovak National Council on September 1, 1992.
The Slovaks place their rights provision early in their document, like most American states, and not as amendments, as in the Constitution of the United States of America.
Francis Amasa Walker, defining the subject of his Money, Trade and Industry (1889), first page.
That is money; all that is money; only that is money, which performs a certain office. To parody a familiar proverb: Money is that Money does.
On August 31, 1870, educator Maria Montessori was born.
August 31 serves as Independence Day for Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, and Trinidad and Tobago.
What is heterodox for the wider culture may be orthodox for the intelligentsia.
George Orwell, unfinished review of Evelyn Waugh, in Our Job Is to Make Life Worth Living: 1949–1950 (2001), as quoted by David Ramsay Steele, Orwell Your Orwell: A Worldview on the Slab (2017), p. 56.
On August 30, 1918, Fanny Yefimovna Kaplan shot and seriously injured Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. Though certainly justifiable on some primary level — evil killers with power probably deserve to be killed in turn — this assassination attempt, like most such, had disastrous consequences, prompting the mass arrests and executions known as the Red Terror.
August 30, 1999, saw East Timor’s referendum vote for independence from Indonesia succeed.
Francis Amasa Walker, Political Economy (third edition, revised and enlarged, 1888), pp. 507-508.
There is not and there never can be any positive virtue in restraint.