What characterizes capitalism is not the bad taste of the crowds, but the fact that these crowds, made prosperous by capitalism, became consumers of literature — of course, of trashy literature. The book market is flooded by a downpour of trivial fiction for the semibarbarians. But this does not prevent great authors from creating imperishable works.
It is an enormous simplification to speak of the American mind. Every American has his own mind.
It is paradoxical indeed that the economic order that forces the most eminent individuals to serve the welfare of the masses of ordinary people is decried as a system in which the common man is “exploited” and “sinks deeper and deeper.” While the average manual worker enjoys in the capitalistic countries amenities of which the well-to-do of ages gone by did not even dream, the most successful and most popular ideology of our age, Marxism, is based upon the doctrine that the laboring masses are being impoverished more and more.
The chief characteristic of the capitalistic system is precisely that it leaves for the most eminent individuals only one avenue open to deriving greatest advantage from their intellectual and moral superiority, viz., to minister to the best of their abilities to the well-being of the masses of less endowed fellow men. The captains of industry vie with one another in endeavors to supply the much talked-about common man with ever better and cheaper goods. An enterprise can .grow into bigness only by serving the many. Capitalism is essentially mass production for the satisfaction of the wants of the masses.
Competition is only the absence of constraint. In what concerns my own interest, I desire to choose for myself, not that another should choose for me, or in spite of me—that is all. And if anyone pretends to substitute his judgment for mine in what concerns me, I should ask to substitute mine for his in what concerns him. What guarantee have we that things would go on better in this way? It is evident that Competition is Liberty.
We cannot feel the wants of others—we cannot feel the satisfactions of others; but we can render service one to another.
Not that Political Economy is without its poetry. There is poetry wherever order and harmony exist.
By the time of the founding, the right to have arms had become fundamental for English subjects.
The first instinct of power is the retention of power, and under a Constitution that requires periodic elections, that is best achieved by the suppression of election-time speech.…
Individuals who have been wronged by unlawful racial discrimination should be made whole; but under our Constitution there can be no such thing as either a creditor or a debtor race. That concept is alien to the Constitution’s focus upon the individual.