Economists From Canada

"In numerous years following the war the Federal government ran a heavy surplus. It could not pay off it's debt, retire its securities, because to do so meant there would be no bonds to back the national bank notes. To pay off the debt was to destroy the money supply."

"Truth has anciently been called the first casualty of war. Money may, in fact, have priority."

"Seaboard Air Line, which was thought by numerous innocents to provide a foothold in aviation, was another favorite, although, in fact, it was a railroad."

"During the last century and until 1907, the United States had panics, and that, unabashedly, is what they were called. But, by 1907, the language was becoming, like so much else, the servant of economic interest. To minimize the shock to confidence, businessmen and bankers had started to explain that any current economic setback was not really a panic, only a crisis. They were undeterred by the use of this term in a much more ominous context—that of the ultimate capitalist crisis—by Marx. By the 1920's, however, the word crisis had also acquired the fearsome connotation of the event it described. Accordingly, men offered reassurance by explaining that it was not a crisis, only a depression. A very soft word. Then the Great Depression associated the most frightful of economic misfortunes with that term, and economic semanticists now explained that no depression was in prospect, at most only a recession. In the 1950s, when there was a modest setback, economists and public officials were united in denying that it was a recession—only a sidewise movement or a rolling readjustment. Mr. Herbert Stein, the amiable man whose difficult honor it was to serve as the economic voice of Richard Nixon, would have referred to the as a growth correction."

"Power is as power does."

"No feature of American—to some extent of Anglo-Saxon—politics is so certain as the tendency of politicians to become first the captives, then the agents, of their opposition. ...In the 1960s, liberal Democrats... urged peace and international amity but continued the Cold War and plunged the country into Vietnam. ...partly because they feared being called appeasers and crypto-Communists by the right. Richard Nixon, having impeccable credentials as a Cold Warrior, moved towards peace or accommodation with Moscow and Peking and withdrew... from Vietnam. Thus on foreign policy he outflanked his liberal opposition. When Professor Milton Friedman proposed a guaranteed income for the poor, it was considered (quite correctly) an act of creative imagination. When a Republican administration proposed it to Congress, it was a mark of conservative statemanship. When George McGovern, running for President, advanced a close variant... it was condemned by conservatives as the dream of a fiscal maniac. As known and stalwart defenders of the dollar, the Republicans were able, in the early 1970s, to devalue it... twice. For anyone suspected of a more flexible attitude towards the integrity of the dollar, such action would have been exceedingly perilous."

"The foresight of financial experts was, as so often, a poor guide to the future."

"In the fifteen years following the First World War, and especially in the immediate aftermath, the industrial nations exploited this new freedom in remarkably diverse fashion. The French followed the line of least resistance with, on the whole, the best results. The British followed the line of greatest wounds. The Germans so handled matters, or so yielded to circumstances, as to produce the greatest inflation of modern times. The United States, by a combination of mismanagement and non-management, produced the greatest depression. In all the long history of money, the decade of the 1920s—extended by a few years to the consequences—is perhaps the most instructive."

"If all else fails immortality can always be assured by adequate error."

"There was something superficial in attributing anything so awful as the Great Depression to anything so insubstantial as speculation in common stocks."

"Economic life, as always, is a matrix in which result becomes cause and cause becomes result."

"What was needed was a policy that increased the supply of money available for use and then ensured its use. Then the state of trade would have to improve."

"Foresight is an imperfect thing — all prevision in economics is imperfect."

"In dealing with Mr. Nixon, it is not easy to be unfair. He invites and justifies all available criticism."

"With the American failure came world failure."

"Those who yearn for the end of capitalism should pray for government by men who believe that all positive action is inimical to what they call thoughtfully the fundamental principles of free enterprise."

"Nothing is more portable than rich people and their money"

"Few things in life can be so appalling as the difference between a dry antiseptic statement of a principle by a well spoken man in a quiet office, and what happens to people when that principle is put into practice."

"Ideas may be superior to vested interest. They are also very often the children of vested interest."

"It's a rule worth having in mind. Income almost always flows along the same axis as power but in the opposite direction."

"People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right. The sensitivity of the poor to injustice is a trivial thing compared with that of the rich."

"Economists are generally negligent of their heroes."

"Because of his compassion Owen was always in trouble with his partners. They would have much preferred a tough, down-to-earth manager who would get a days work out of the little bastards."

"Economics is not an exact science."

"Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied."

"American university presidents are a nervous breed; I have never thought well of them as a class."

"The masters thought they were loved until one day one of their favorites farted loudly while serving dinner and the next day was gone. The very first manifestation of the classless society is the disappearance of the servant class."

"The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not."

"I've long believed alas, that in highly organized industrial societies, capitalist or socialist, the stronger tendency is to converge — that if steel or automobiles are wanted and must be made on a large scale, the process will stamp its imprint on the society, whether that me be Magnitogorsk or Gary, Indiana."

"All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum."

"Conscience is better served by a myth."

"It was in World War I that the age-old certainties were lost. Until then aristocrats and capitalists felt secure in their position, and even socialists felt certain in their faith. It was never to be so again. The Age of Uncertainty began."

"If inheritance qualifies one for office, intelligence cannot be a requirement."

"Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce."

"Who is king in the world of the blind when there isn't even a one eyed man?"

"Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects."

"He enlarged perceptibly the scope for debate, liberalized appreciably the intellectual and cultural life of the country and proclaimed the obvious truth that, after an atomic exchange, little would distinguish the Communist ashes from the capitalist ashes."

"The myth that holds that the great corporation is the puppet of the market, the powerless servant of the consumer, is, in fact one of the devices by which its power is perpetuated."

"The privileged have regularly invited their own destruction with their greed."

"The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it becameNew York, London or Tokyo."

"Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down."

"But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple."

"When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it."

"All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership."

"A nuclear war does not defend a country and it does not defend a system. I've put it the same way many times; not even the most accomplished ideologue will be able to tell the difference between the ashes of capitalism and the ashes of communism."

"Get the process of negotiation away from the small specialized group that some people have called the "nuclear theologians," who in effect said this is a complicated issue of seeing how little we can give away, how much we can extract from the other side; it's highly specialized. Only a few people can understand the nature of these weapons, the delivery systems, the targeting, the nature of the MIRV and the CRUISE, on down, and the MX. This kept the whole discussion to a very limited group of people who, in a way, had assumed responsibility for saying whether we should live or die."

"The huge capacity to purchase submission that goes with any large sum of money, well, this we have. This is a power of which we should all be aware."

"Lord Ronald said nothing; he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions."

"Of course, Pupkin would never have thought of considering himself on an intellectual par with Mallory Tompkins. That would have been ridiculous. Mallory Tompkins had read all sorts of things and had half a mind to write a novel himself—either that or a play. All he needed, he said, was to have a chance to get away somewhere by himself and think. Every time he went away to the city Pupkin expected that he might return with the novel all finished; but though he often came back with his eyes red from thinking, the novel as yet remained incomplete."

"My parents migrated to Canada in 1876, and I decided to go with them."