We have seen this complete right wing takeover of modern liberalism, and it is an ugly spectacle to behold.
Like all other contracts, wages should be left to the fair and free competition of themarket, and should never be controlled by the interference of the legislature.
In many respects fascism not only is here but has been here for nearly a century. For what we call liberalism--the refurbished edifice of American Progressivism--is in fact a descendant and manifestation of fascism.
Liberalism itself, is, on all matters connected with Church and Education, only a kind of corporate and "respectable" ungodliness.
There is nothing in the basic principles of liberalism to make it a stationary creed; there are no hard-and-fast rules fixed once and for all. ... Probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez faire.
Liberalism itself has failed, and for a pretty good reason. It has been too often compromised by the people who represented it.
When I was Governor, Louis Kelso went out of his way to brief me. I was very impressed, but I was never able to get any of the economists in state government to give him the help his plan deserves.
The society of Christendom and especially of Western Christendom up to the explosion, which we call the Reformation, had been a society of owners: a Proprietarial Society. It was one in which there remained strong bonds between one class and another, and in which there was a hierarchy of superior and inferior, but not, in the main, a distinction between a restricted body of possessors and a main body of destitute at the mercy of the possessors, such as our society has become.
The very large units of production and exchange have access to credit on a large scale, sometimes without any cover at all, merely upon the prospect of their success, and always upon terms far easier than are open to their smaller rivals. It is perhaps on this line of easier credit that large capital today does most harm to small capital, drives it out and ruins it.
Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all it combinations of skill and force, can do in his favor. In this partnership all men have equal rights; but not to equal things.
There are no free lunches on welfare.
The restoration of property would be a complicated, arduous and presumably a lengthy business; the transformation of a Capitalist Society into a Communist one needs nothing but the extension of existing conditions.
Concentrate your energy, thought and capital exclusively upon the business in which you are engaged... 'Don't put all your eggs in one basket' is all wrong. I tell you 'put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch that basket.'
It is significant that the nationalization of thought has proceded everywhere pari passu with the nationalization of industry.
The Reformation has been called in a biting epigram "a rising of the rich against the poor."
The old freedom sufficiently survives in the mind of the wage earner to give him the illusion that, while accepting insurance and maintenance from the capitalist state, he can still be a full citizen. He thinks he can have his cake and eat it too. He is mistaken. The great capitalists who procured these regulations from the politicians knew what they were at. They were catching their proletariat in a net, and now they hold it fast.
The machine does not control the mind of man, though it affects the mind of man; it is the mind of man that can and should control the machine.
We can't have these great corporations crowding competition off the sidewalks. It's like an elephant saying, "Everyone for himself," as he dances among the chickens.
The larger unit can borrow more easily in proportion than the smaller. It can especially tap bank credit more easily and bank credit is, to-day, the chief factor in economic activity of all kinds.
The larger the unit of capital present, the easier the transaction called emission of credit. Centralized lending of this kind (which is today universal) actively promotes the absorption of the small man by the great, the reduction of small property owners to a proletarian condition.
Two hundred years ago the first liberal economist, Adam Smith, warned businessmen that they could absorb only a certain amount of rigidity. In the easy days after World War II... wage rises could be financed out of inflationary price increases.
Slowly but certainly the proletarian, by every political reform which secures his well-being under new rules of insurance, of State control in education, of State medicine and the rest, is developing into the slave, leaving the rich man apart and free. All industrial civilization is clearly moving towards the re-establishment of the Servile State.
The worship of the nation has been able to make men tolerate under its authority what they could never have tolerated from princes: a submission to rule, which, through sumptuary laws on food and drink, through conscription, through a cast-iron system of compulsory instruction for all on State ordered lines, and through a State examination at the gate of every profession, has almost killed the citizen's power to react upon that which controls him, and has almost destroyed that variety which is the mark of life.
The term "Socialism" becomes a common label for the various theories of attack upon the principle of property, the various policies of communal control at the expense of the family and individual freedom.
To control the production of wealth is to control human life itself. To refuse man the opportunity for the production of wealth is to refuse him the opportunity for life; and, in general, the way in which the production of wealth is by law permitted is the only way in which the citizens can legally exist.
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