It is impossible not to notice how little the proponents of the ideal of competition have to say about honesty, which is the fundamental economic virtue, and how very little they have to say about community, compassion, and mutual help.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Essay (1988), “Economy and Pleasure,” What Are People For? (1990)
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Quotations about:
laissez-faire
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Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Essay (1988), “Economy and Pleasure,” What Are People For? (1990)
(Source)
Many of us have beliefs that aren’t really genuine; we just think they’re genuine. We think individualism is genuine. We think laissez faire is genuine. We don’t really want it. Big business bemoans government interference. It would be horrified if the government, for example, did away with patent laws.
Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998) American historian, writer, activist
Interview (1970-02) by John A. Garraty, “American Nationalism,” Interpreting American History: Conversations with Historians, Part 1, ch. 4 (1970)
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In brief, all this Mammon-Gospel, of Supply-and-demand, Competition, Laissez-faire, and Devil take the hindmost, begins to be one of the shabbiest Gospels ever preached on Earth; or altogether the shabbiest.
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) Scottish essayist and historian
Past and Present, Book 3, ch. 9 “Working Aristocracy” (1843)
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What is the new loyalty? It is, above all, conformity. It is the uncritical and unquestioning acceptance of America as it is — the political institutions, the social relationships, the economic practices. It rejects inquiry into the race question or socialized medicine, or public housing, or into the wisdom or validity of our foreign policy. It regards as particularly heinous any challenge to what is called “the system of private enterprise,” identifying that system with Americanism. It abandons evolution, repudiates the once popular concept of progress, and regards America as a finished product, perfect and complete.
We have passed beyond the time of what they call the laisser-faire school which believes that the Government ought to do nothing but run a police force.
William Howard Taft (1857-1930) US President (1909-13) and Chief Justice (1921-1930)
Speech, Milwaukee (17 Sep 1909)
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As for the Republicans — how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their yes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously ) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license, or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical “American heritage” — economic oversight, price-fixing, “government in business”, etc. recur often in American colonial history) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.
H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) American fabulist [Howard Phillips Lovecraft]
Letter (1936-08) to Catherine L. Moore
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