Category: Thought

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.

Wages are a speculation. The laborer who offers his labor to a trader or a contractor, argues thus with him: ‘I deliver to you so much labor. It is true that you run the risks of the enterprise. You are obliged to make advances of capital. You may gain or lose. That does not concern me. I do my work, I make it over to you at a certain price; you pay this to me whatever happens. Whether it redounds to your benefit or causes you loss is not my affair.’

Yves Guyot, The Tyranny of Socialism, Laissez Faire Books, 2015, LFB.org.

“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.

“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.