Category: Thought

“Men of integrity are generally pretty obstinate in adhering to an opinion once adopted.”

William Cobbett (1763-1835), British pamphleteer, 1796.

“[E]very individual spontaneously tries to find the place and the trade in which he can best increase National gain, if laws do not prevent him from doing so.”

Anders Chydenius, The National Gain, §5, 1765.

“Nothing is so well calculated to produce a death-like torpor in the country as an extended system of taxation and a great national debt.”

William Cobbett (1763-1835), British pamphleteer, 1804.

“The exercise of one coercion always makes another inevitable.”

Anders Chydenius (1739 – 1803) was a Swedish priest and politician born in what is now Ostrobothnian Finland. This quotation is from his “Thoughts on the Natural Rights of Servants and Peasants,” 1778.

Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts.

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.”