Bureaucracies established by prohibition are inherently inefficient and unable to discover the knowledge required to solve social problems. Prohibition also suppresses the market’s ability to solve social problems, so that little or no progress is made while prohibitions are in effect. And finally, prohibitions create profit opportunities which add to the problems prohibition is intended to solve.
Dr. Mark Thornton, The Economics of Prohibition (1991).
In our ignorance, we could not see that the Kaiser’s Germany and the Communist International were merely two aspects of the Old World’s reaction against the new, the American principle of individual liberty and human rights.
Rose Wilder Lane, Give Me Liberty (1936).
“Commerce makes the action of arbitrary power over our existence more oppressive than in the past, because, as our speculations are more varied, arbitrary power must multiply itself to reach them. But commerce also makes the action of arbitrary power easier to elude, because it changes the nature of property, which becomes, in virtue of this change, almost impossible to seize.
“Commerce confers a new quality on property, circulation. Without circulation, property is merely a usufruct; political authority can always affect usufruct, because it can prevent its enjoyment; but circulation creates an invisible and invincible obstacle to the actions of social power.
“The effects of commerce extend even further: not only does it emancipate individuals, but, by creating credit, it places authority itself in a position of dependence.”
Benjamin Constant, The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns, 1819.
[W]ith the progress of society, government has within its sphere grown more powerful and efficient, this sphere has not been greatly enlarged. But the sphere of individual activity has greatly enlarged, and with the spread of knowledge the individual has become better able to maintain his rights against society, and governments are becoming less and less able to manage him.
Simon Newcomb, Principles of Political Economy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1886), p. 447.
American life is a powerful solvent. As it stamps the immigrant, almost before he can speak English, with an unmistakable muscular tension, cheery self-confidence and habitual challenge in the voice and eyes, so it seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good-will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States (1920).
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
George Santayana, “Why I Am Not a Marxist” Modern Monthly: Volume: 9 (April 1935); Page: 77-79.
Class after class of men have seen a large part of their employment taken from them by machinery, so that at the present time there is scarcely any demand for the labor which millions of men had to perform a century ago. And yet, in spite of this, the laborer gets higher wages than he did a century ago, and is as fully employed as he ever was. In the whole history of the contest we do not find a case of a general and permanent fall of wages from the introduction of machinery.
Simon Newcomb, Principles of Political Economy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1886), p. 388.
Liberty may be maimed, but not killed; reason may be bent, but not broken.
George Santayana, Egotism in German Philosophy, 1915
During recent years a number of pseudo-economists have indulged in much glibness about the passing of the ‘economy of scarcity’ and the arrival of the ‘economy of abundance.’ Sophistry of this sort has claimed the public ear far too long; it is high time that the speciousness of such fantastic views be clearly and definitely exposed. Attention needs to be focused on the hard elementary fact that man’s darkest curse has ever been his poverty, and that it yet is and promises to continue so for numberless generations. No economist worthy of the name, moreover, should need to be reminded that in the absence of “scarcity” there would be no system of ‘economy’ and no ‘science of economics.’
C.A. Phillips, T.F. McManus, and R.W. Nelson Banking and the Business Cycle: A Study of the Great Depression in the United States (Laissez Faire Books, 2014), originally published 1937.
The Inca’s way of dealing with his whole empire seems not to have differed from his conduct in setting up his capital. His procedure there too was marked by the elaboration of a rational program, its execution by authoritarian decree, and finally the laying down of regulations designed to prevent any occasion of disturbance and to render the organization definite and permanent. Naturally, this system, so logical in its plan, was bound to encounter obstacles in adapting itself to realities.
Louis Baudin, A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru.