25 quotes found
"Currency competition and free banking might increase the efficiency of the financial system, and bring some small triangle welfare gains. But the key question is whether their adoption would improve macroeconomic performance. Even though Salin argues (p. 281) that ‘the best system is that which produces the least inflation’, fluctuations in output are also expensive. Hayek states that the adoption of his proposal would end recessions. There is absolutely no reason to believe that. Nineteenth century history is evidence that free banking and currency issue, in the wrong legal and regulatory framework, can produce rather than reduce instability. The proponents of free banking and currency issue in this volume do not go much beyond a general belief in competition in justifying their views; they have certainly not explored the necessary legal and regulatory environment in any detail."
"I still think Keynesian economics is extremely important, and if anybody didn’t think so, this crisis should have made them rethink."
"Part of the downfall came early and on theoretical grounds, with the realization that real-world information lags for aggregate variables like the price level and money supply were much too short to rationalize the persistent multiyear deviations from equilibrium that seemed to characterize business cycles in most industrialized countries. The second dubious assumption, continuous market clearing, was viewed more critically once it was recognized that it was not an inextricable concomitant of rational expectations, especially when Stanley Fischer (1977) and Edmund Phelps and John Taylor (1977) showed that rational expectations could be embedded in a model containing real-world institutional features like multiperiod wage and price contracts to generate nonmarket-clearing behavior. Once Fischer and Phelps-Taylor had shown that rational expectations by itself was a necessary but not a sufficient condition to validate new-classical policy conclusions, the race was on to develop the new-Keynesian theory based on rational expectations and one or another institutional impediment to continuous market clearing."
"Something always dies when the lion feeds — and yet there is meat for those that follow him."
"When a traveller gets a thorn in his foot," Mbejane went on softly, "and he is wise, he plucks it out — and he is a fool, he leaves it and says, 'I will keep this thorn to prick me so that I will always remember the road upon which I have travelled.' Nkosi, it is better to remember with pleasure than with pain."
"Beware of your most implacable enemy — yourself."
"They do say that socialism is the ideal philosophy — just as long as you have capitalists to pay for it."
"Should five slaves dictate to a king? If five baboons bark, must the black-maned lion tremble?"
"Robin Hood was also a terrorist ― but he had some style and a little class."
"It's an old chestnut, but those set to guard a treasure, are too often those who loot it."
"It’s a strange paradox that a man gifted with too many talents can fritter them all away without developing a single one to its full."
"History is a river that never ends. Today is history, and I am here at the fountainhead."
"Rage makes a man sick, my son. It spoils his appetite for life and keeps him from sleep at night. We cannot change our world, so we must look for the good things in life and enjoy those to the full."
"The best cure for racism is have somebody shoot at you. Man, it does not matter then what colour the arse is that comes to save yours — black or white, you’re ready to give it a big fat kiss."
"A cynic had defined aid as simply the system by which poor white people in rich countries gave money to rich black people in poor countries to put into Swiss bank accounts."
"No profit was too small to despise; no loss was too small to abhor."
"War is the game played by old men with the lives of the young."
"'A man follows the path laid out for him. He does his duty to God and his king. He does what he must do, not what pleases him.' He felt the anger and outrage building in him. ‘God’s truth, boy, what kind of world would this be if every man did what pleased him alone? Who would plough the fields and reap the harvest, if every man had the right to say, "I don’t want to do that." In this world there is a place for every man, but every man must know his place.'"
"The branch breaks that will not bend with the wind. You must learn to bend."
"Duplicity thy name is woman!"
"We are all mere insects caught in the web that the gods spin for us."
"The most effective way to kill any animal is for it to die before it even knows you are there."
"I've eaten lion, leopard, crocodile, python. I don't recommend lion. It tastes exactly like when a tomcat comes into your house and sprays."
"It's a melancholy and moving thing to hunt an elephant. It's like shooting an old man."
"They say if you drink Zambezi water with your mother's milk, you are always a slave of Africa, and I am."