“Industrial progress is due to individuals, not to governments. No state discovered gravitation, and, if humanity had waited for governments to apply steam and electricity to our daily needs, we should have neither railways, telephones, nor telegraphs.”
Yves Guyot Where and Why Public Ownership Has Failed, p. 292
Guyot (September 6, 1843 – February 22, 1928), a French journalist, politician and economist, was an uncompromising free-trader.
“People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible for the older people and the kids? . . . It’s just not right. It’s not right. It’s not, it’s not going to change anything. We’ll, we’ll get our justice . . . Please, we can get along here; we all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out.”
“When we see that the most ardent advocates of the minimum wage law have been the AFL-CIO, and that the concrete effect of the minimum wage laws has been to cripple the low-wage competition of the marginal workers as against higher-wage workers with union seniority, the true motivation of the agitation for the minimum wage becomes apparent.”
One of the chief charms of Political Economy is the open secret, that it deals not with rigidities and inflexible qualities and mathematical quantities and the unchanging laws of matter, but with the billowy play of desires and estimates and purposes and satisfactions, all of which are mental states, and all of which are subject in the general to ascertainable laws, though laws of a quite different kind from those of Mechanics. Values come and they go. Within certain limits and under certain conditions they may be anticipated and even predicted, but never with the precision of an eclipse or the result of a known chemical combination.
“The effect of a protective duty on any commodity is to raise the price, not only of the amount imported, but of the whole quantity sold in the country; it is a private tax placed upon consumers for the benefit of producers.”
Yves Guyot (6 September 1843 – 22 February 1928) was a French politician and economist.
He was an uncompromising free-trader.
“Security to the persons and properties of the governed is so obviously the design and end of civil government, that to attempt a logical proof of it would be like burning tapers at noonday, to assist the sun in enlightening the world.”
What is called the Progress of Civilization has been marked and conditioned at every step by an extension of the opportunities, a greater facility in the use of the means, a more eager searching for proper experdients, and a higher certainty in the securing of the returns, of mutual exchanges among men.
What is called the Progress of Civilization has been marked and conditioned at every step by an extension of the opportunities, a greater facility in the use of the means, a more eager searching for proper experdients, and a higher certainty in the securing of the returns, of mutual exchanges among men.
[T]he powers reserved by the people [under the Constitution] render them secure, and until they themselves become corrupt, they will always have upright and able rules.
[W]e dread nothing but slavery. Death is the creature of a poltroon’s brains; ’tis immortality to sacrifice ourselves for the salvation of our country. We fear not death. That gloomy night, that palefaced moon, and the affrighted starts that hurried through the sky, can witness that we fear not death.