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| Quotations - General | [Quote No.44423] Need Area: Friends > General
"It should come as no surprise that the key drivers of economic output within a country include factors such as the size and growth of the workforce and the capital available for investments. What is less obvious is that a number of ‘soft’ variables such as labour market flexibility, economic freedom, the quality of the legal system (contract rights and property rights are particularly important in this respect) and the intrusiveness of the government into the business sector all play a role in defining the quality of a country’s economic life. Jointly, all these soft factors are known as the incentive structure.
Back in 2010, Woody Brock invited management consultant Dietmar Meyersiek to do a study on the link between incentive structures and the quality of economic life in many countries around the world5. Meyersiek measured a country’s incentive structures through a number of variables, and found that many of these had a significant impact on income and wealth in a country.
Meyersiek subsequently went beyond a simple bi-variable analysis and found that three variables between them - property rights, government [political interventions and] intrusiveness and business regulation – explained about 77% of the variance of GDP per capita amongst the approximately 140 countries in the study." - The Absolute Return Partners
Financial analysts. Quote from their 'Absolute Return Letter', September 2012.[http://www.arpllp.com/core_files/The_Absolute_Return_Letter_0912%281%29.pdf ]
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| [Quote No.44424] Need Area: Friends > General
"[Statist politicians will often try to quietly and preemptively enact laws that protect them from the legal consequences of what would otherwise be 'illegal' activities they are planning in the future, unless stopped by a skeptical and vigilant opposition and populace. An example would be Hitler’s 1933 Post-Reichstag Fire Emergency Decree, that later allowed him to become the supreme dictator of Germany before starting the Second World War. Another example is the original one page, carte-blanche proposal for the US government and Federal Reserve's steps to respond to the 2007-09 Great Recession, sometimes called the Global Financial Crisis. Still another example is the 2012 draft of the ESM - European Stability Mechanism - as follows:]
Article 32, para 3: The ESM, its property, funding and assets, wherever located and by whomsoever held, shall enjoy immunity from every form of judicial process. [There is one exception – entirely in the ESM’s favour.]
para 4: The property, funding and assets of the ESM shall, wherever located and by whomsoever held, be immune from search, requisition, confiscation, expropriation or any other form of seizure, taking or foreclosure by executive, judicial, administrative or legislative action.
para 8: To the extent necessary to carry out the activities provided for in this Treaty, all property, funding and assets of the ESM shall be free from restrictions, regulations, controls and moratoria of any nature.
Article 35, para 1: In the interest of the ESM, the Chairperson of the Board of Governors, Governors, alternate Governors, Directors, alternate Directors, as well as the Managing Director and other staff members shall be immune from legal proceedings with respect to acts performed by them in their official capacity and shall enjoy inviolability in respect of their official papers and documents." - John Ward
Founder of 'The Slog' website. [http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/09/09/the-esms-articles-todays-must-read/ ]
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| [Quote No.44433] Need Area: Friends > General
"Almost everything appertaining to [part of] the circumstances of a nation, has been absorbed and confounded [confused] under the general and mysterious word government [and the politicians and bureaucrats that govern]. Though it avoids taking to its account the errors it commits, and the mischiefs it occasions, it fails not to arrogate [claim without justification] to itself whatever has the appearance of prosperity. It robs industry of its honours, by pedantically [fussily, nit-pickingly] making itself the cause of its effects; and purloins [steals] from the general character of man, the merits that appertain [belong] to him as a social being." - Thomas Paine
(1737 - 1809), English-American political activist, author, political theorist and revolutionary.
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| [Quote No.44434] Need Area: Friends > General
"The idea of a modern constitution is precisely to impose limits on political majorities." - Udo di Fabio
Author of the opinion of the Verfassungsgericht, the German Federal Constitutional Court, in 2011 regarding the EMU - European Monetary Union - bailout machinery. They stated that the Bundestag may not alienate its budgetary powers to any 'supra-national body' on a permanent basis, even if it wishes to. It cannot sign off on open-ended liabilities. [Refer http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ambroseevans-pritchard/100019947/only-the-german-people-can-renounce-their-sovereignty/ ]
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| [Quote No.44514] Need Area: Friends > General
"[People who continually demand greater power for government so it can do things to help the group they belong to should remember that this sets up laws and precedents that can be turned against them in the future and therefore may not be the best move for them in the long run...] A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have." - Thomas Jefferson
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| [Quote No.44516] Need Area: Friends > General
"[For those people wanting to help improve people's living standards, even at the expense of the citizens' individual freedom and responsibility, that think the way to do that is by calling for more government paternalism by giving government more money and power and thereby allowing it to grow larger, rather than keeping government to a minimum, are their own worst enemies because economic studies of history show that this results in the exact opposite of what they espouse, namely slower growth of GDP, income and peoples' living standards]...an increase in government size by 10 percentage points is associated with a 0.5% to 1% lower annual growth rate." - Andreas Bergh and Magnus Henrekson
Andreas Bergh, Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN) Lund University and Magnus Henrekson, Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN) Lund University. Quote from their study 'Government Size and Growth: A Survey and Interpretation of the Evidence'. Journal of Economic Surveys, April 2011. Page 2, [http://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Govt-Size-and-Growth.pdf. ]
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| [Quote No.44518] Need Area: Friends > General
"[Politicians these days believe...] People only accept change in necessity and see necessity only in crisis. [Therefore unfortunately they will wait for a crisis, or worse engineer a crisis, before they feel they can make changes that are necessary rather than believing in people's rationality and trying to lead by education and persuasion.]" - Jean Monnet
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| [Quote No.44520] Need Area: Friends > General
"Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private [inalienable human] rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents ['mob rule' - unless the government upholds the constitution that requires government to protect equally the inalienable human rights of all, especially minorities including the smallest minority - the individual, even from the wishes and force of a democratic majority]." - James Madison
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA and 4th US President. Source: letter to Thomas Jefferson
(Oct. 17, 1788), THE PAPERS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 19 (Julian P. Boyd ed., 1958).
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| [Quote No.44521] Need Area: Friends > General
"[Self-Defence and Martial Arts:] A covenant not to defend myself from force by force is always void. For ... no man can transfer or lay down his Right to save himself. For the right men have by Nature to protect themselves, when none else can protect them, can by no Covenant be relinquished. ... [The right] to defend ourselves [is the] summe of the Right of Nature." - Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1679) English philosopher and political theorist.
Source: Leviathan 88, 95 (reprint 1964) (1651)
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| [Quote No.44522] Need Area: Friends > General
"He that thinks absolute power purifies men's blood, and corrects the baseness of human nature, need read the history of this, or any other age, to be convinced to the contrary. [Those that call for more power for government, and therefore less for citizens, so they can be more paternalistic and 'helpful' do not understand human nature for the eventual abuse of power has been the rule throughout history.] " - John Locke
(1632 - 1704), English philosopher and political theorist. Considered the ideological progenitor of the American Revolution and who, by far, was the most often non-biblical writer quoted by the Founding Fathers of the USA.
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| [Quote No.44523] Need Area: Friends > General
"[Freedom of religion:] The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say
there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." - Thomas Jefferson
(1743 - 1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence and was the 3rd US President.
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| [Quote No.44529] Need Area: Friends > General
"It is doubtful that the government [including their politicians and bureaucrats] knows much more than the public does about how government [economic] policies will work [which goes some way to explain their many failures and unintended consequences, but not why they still believe in interferring in a free market that doesn't need their efforts to be efficient and responsive to customers' needs]." - W. Allen Wallis
(1912 – 1998), American economist and statistician.
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| [Quote No.44533] Need Area: Friends > General
"Anger is short madness." - Horace
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| [Quote No.44534] Need Area: Friends > General
"We prefer self-government with danger to servitude in tranquility." - Kwame Nkrumah
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| [Quote No.44537] Need Area: Friends > General
"If the secret sorrows of everyone could be read on their forehead, how many who now cause envy would suddenly become the objects of pity!" - Italian Proverb
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| [Quote No.44543] Need Area: Friends > General
"It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men [the majority] exhibit their tyranny [force and coercion over the unalienable human rights of minorities, including the smallest, weakest minority - the individual]... Individuality is the aim of political liberty. By leaving to the citizen as much freedom of action and of being, as comports with order and the rights of others, the institutions render him truly a freeman. He is left to pursue his means of happiness in his own manner." - James Fenimore Cooper
(1789 - 1851), American author. He wrote the best-selling classic, 'Last of the Mohicans'.
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| [Quote No.44545] Need Area: Friends > General
"The title of the offender and the number of his followers make no difference in the offence, unless it be to aggravate it. The only difference is, great robbers punish little ones to keep them in their obedience; but the great ones are rewarded with laurels and triumphs, because they are too big for the weak hands of justice in this world, and have the power in their own possession which should punish offenders." - John Locke
Quote from his book, 'The Second Treatise of Civil Government', 1690.
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| [Quote No.44546] Need Area: Friends > General
"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without [the right to due process of law in this case habeas corpus - i.e.] formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government [force and coercion] whether Nazi or Communist." - Winston Churchill
British Prime Minister during World War II.
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| [Quote No.44549] Need Area: Friends > General
"[Freedom of Religion:] We establish no religion in this country. We command no worship. We mandate no belief, nor will we ever. Church and state are and must remain separate." - Ronald Reagan
(1911 - 2004), 40th US President.
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| [Quote No.44551] Need Area: Friends > General
"There is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head." - Theodore Roosevelt
(1858 - 1919), Republican politician and 26th President of the United States of America (1901–1909).
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| [Quote No.44559] Need Area: Friends > General
"[Politicians know...] A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows [- not necessarily how the real vote will be]." - O. Henry
(1862 - 1910), pen-name of William Sidney Porter, famous for writing short-stories.
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| [Quote No.44617] Need Area: Friends > General
"We want...a revolution - a turning of the wheel, so that the state becomes once again the servant of the people, and not the other way around." - Daniel John Hannan
(1971 - ), British journalist, author and politician who is a Member of the European Parliament, representing South East England for the Conservative Party.
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| [Quote No.44618] Need Area: Friends > General
"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance." - Cicero
(55 BC)
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| [Quote No.44628] Need Area: Friends > General
"[Free-market capitalism is capable of creating and producing all that humanity needs, better than any government or other single organising group could, as explained in the following famous essay:] ( ‘I, Pencil’ - Introduction: by Lawrence W. Reed, President, Foundation for Economic Education...
Eloquent. Extraordinary. Timeless. Paradigm-shifting. Classic. Half a century after it first appeared, Leonard Read’s ‘I, Pencil’ still evokes such adjectives of praise. Rightfully so, for this little essay opens eyes and minds among people of all ages. Many first-time readers never see the world quite the same again.
Ideas are most powerful when they’re wrapped in a compelling story. Leonard’s main point — economies can hardly be ‘planned’ when not one soul possesses all the know-how and skills to produce a simple pencil — unfolds in the enchanting words of a pencil itself. Leonard could have written ‘I, Car’ or ‘I, Airplane,’ but choosing those more complex items would have muted the message. No one person — repeat, no one, no matter how smart or how many degrees follow his name — could create from scratch a small, everyday pencil, let alone a car or an airplane.
This is a message that humbles the high and mighty. It pricks the inflated egos of those who think they know how to mind everybody else’s business. It explains in plain language why central planning is an exercise in arrogance and futility, or what Nobel laureate and Austrian economist F. A. Hayek aptly termed ‘the pretence of knowledge.’
Indeed, a major influence on Read’s thinking in this regard was Hayek’s famous 1945 article, ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society.’ In demolishing the spurious claims of the socialists of the day, Hayek wrote, ’This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals.’
Maximilien Robespierre is said to have blessed the horrific French Revolution with this chilling declaration: ‘On ne saurait pas faire une omelette sans casser des oeufs.’ Translation: ‘One can’t expect to make an omelet without breaking eggs.’ A consummate statist who worked tirelessly to plan the lives of others, he would become the architect of the Revolution’s bloodiest phase—the Reign of Terror of 1793–94.
Robespierre and his guillotine broke eggs by the thousands in a vain effort to impose a utopian society with government planners at the top and everybody else at the bottom. That French experience is but one example in a disturbingly familiar pattern. Call them what you will — socialists, interventionists, collectivists, statists — history is littered with their presumptuous plans for rearranging society to fit their vision of the common good, plans that always fail as they kill or impoverish other people in the process. If socialism ever earns a final epitaph, it will be this: Here lies a contrivance engineered by know-it-alls who broke eggs with abandon but never, ever created an omelet.
None of the Robespierres of the world knew how to make a pencil, yet they wanted to remake entire societies. How utterly preposterous, and mournfully tragic! But we will miss a large implication of Leonard Read’s message if we assume it aims only at the tyrants whose names we all know. The lesson of ‘I, Pencil’ is not that error begins when the planners plan big. It begins the moment one tosses humility aside, assumes he knows the unknowable, and employs the force of the State against peaceful individuals. That’s not just a national disease. It can be very local indeed.
In our midst are people who think that if only they had government power on their side, they could pick tomorrow’s winners and losers in the marketplace, set prices or rents where they ought to be, decide which forms of energy should power our homes and cars, and choose which industries should survive and which should die. They should stop for a few moments and learn a little humility from a lowly writing implement.
While ‘I, Pencil’ shoots down the baseless expectations for central planning, it provides a supremely uplifting perspective of the individual. Guided by Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ of prices, property, profits, and incentives, free people [and division of labor – talent, experience and resources] accomplish economic miracles of which socialist theoreticians can only dream. As the interests of countless individuals from around the world converge to produce pencils without a single ‘master mind,’ so do they also come together in free markets to feed, clothe, house, educate, and entertain hundreds of millions of people at ever higher levels. With great pride, FEE [Foundation for Economic Education] publishes this new edition of ‘I, Pencil’ to mark the essay’s 50th anniversary. Someday there will be a centennial edition, maybe even a millennial one. This essay is truly one for the ages.)
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‘I, Pencil’ -
I am a lead pencil — the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.
Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that’s all I do.
You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story is interesting. And, next, I am a mystery — more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For, the wise G. K. Chesterton observed, ‘We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.’
I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me — no, that’s too much to ask of anyone — if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because — well, because I am seemingly so simple.
Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S.A. each year.
Pick me up and look me over. What do you see? Not much meets the eye — there’s some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.
Innumerable Antecedents:
Just as you cannot trace your family tree back very far, so is it impossible for me to name and explain all my antecedents. But I would like to suggest enough of them to impress upon you the richness and complexity of my background.
My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding. Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope; the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the cookery and the raising of all the foods. Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers drink!
The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California. Can you imagine the individuals who make flat cars and rails and railroad engines and who construct and install the communication systems incidental thereto? These legions are among my antecedents.
Consider the millwork in San Leandro. The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil-length slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. These are kiln dried and then tinted for the same reason women put rouge on their faces. People prefer that I look pretty, not a pallid white. The slats are waxed and kiln dried again. How many skills went into the making of the tint and the kilns, into supplying the heat, the light and power, the belts, motors, and all the other things a mill requires? Sweepers in the mill among my ancestors? Yes, and included are the men who poured the concrete for the dam of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company hydroplant which supplies the mill’s power!
Don’t overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting sixty carloads of slats across the nation.
Once in the pencil factory — $4,000,000 in machinery and building, all capital accumulated by thrifty and saving parents of mine — each slat is given eight grooves by a complex machine, after which another machine lays leads in every other slat, applies glue, and places another slat atop — a lead sandwich, so to speak. Seven brothers and I are mechanically carved from this ‘wood-clinched’ sandwich.
My ‘lead’ itself — it contains no lead at all — is complex. The graphite is mined in Ceylon [Sri Lanka]. Consider these miners and those who make their many tools and the makers of the paper sacks in which the graphite is shipped and those who make the string that ties the sacks and those who put them aboard ships and those who make the ships. Even the lighthouse keepers along the way assisted in my birth — and the harbor pilots.
The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in which ammonium hydroxide is used in the refining process. Then wetting agents are added such as sulfonated tallow — animal fats chemically reacted with sulfuric acid. After passing through numerous machines, the mixture finally appears as endless extrusions — as from a sausage grinder — cut to size, dried, and baked for several hours at 1,850 degrees Fahrenheit. To increase their strength and smoothness the leads are then treated with a hot mixture which includes candelilla wax from Mexico, paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats.
My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. Do you know all the ingredients of lacquer? Who would think that the growers of castor beans and the refiners of castor oil are a part of it? They are. Why, even the processes by which the lacquer is made a beautiful yellow involve the skills of more persons than one can enumerate!
Observe the labeling. That’s a film formed by applying heat to carbon black mixed with resins. How do you make resins and what, pray, is carbon black?
My bit of metal — the ferrule — is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain.
Then there’s my crowning glory, inelegantly referred to in the trade as ‘the plug,’ the part man uses to erase the errors he makes with me. An ingredient called ‘factice’ is what does the erasing. It is a rubber-like product made by reacting rapeseed oil from the Dutch East Indies [Indonesia] with sulfur chloride. Rubber, contrary to the common notion, is only for binding purposes. Then, too, there are numerous vulcanizing and accelerating agents. The pumice comes from Italy; and the pigment which gives ‘the plug’ its color is cadmium sulfide.
No One Knows:
Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me?
Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others. Now, you may say that I go too far in relating the picker of a coffee berry in far-off Brazil and food growers elsewhere to my creation; that this is an extreme position. I shall stand by my claim. There isn’t a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how the only difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type of know-how. Neither the miner nor the logger can be dispensed with, any more than can the chemist at the factory or the worker in the oil field — paraffin being a by-product of petroleum.
Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me. Each one wants me less, perhaps, than does a child in the first grade. Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants. I may or may not be among these items.
No Master Mind:
There is a fact still more astounding: The absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work. This is the mystery to which I earlier referred.
It has been said that ‘only God can make a tree.’ Why do we agree with this? Isn’t it because we realize that we ourselves could not make one? Indeed, can we even describe a tree? We cannot, except in superficial terms. We can say, for instance, that a certain molecular configuration manifests itself as a tree. But what mind is there among men that could even record, let alone direct, the constant changes in molecules that transpire in the life span of a tree? Such a feat is utterly unthinkable!
I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies — millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human masterminding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.
The above is what I meant when writing, ‘If you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing.’ For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand — that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive master-minding — then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith.
Once government has had a monopoly of a creative activity such, for instance, as the delivery of the mails, most individuals will believe that the mails could not be efficiently delivered by men acting freely. And here is the reason: Each one acknowledges that he himself doesn’t know how to do all the things incident to mail delivery. He also recognizes that no other individual could do it. These assumptions are correct. No individual possesses enough know-how to perform a nation’s mail delivery any more than any individual possesses enough know-how to make a pencil. Now, in the absence of faith in free people — in the unawareness that millions of tiny know-hows would naturally and miraculously form and cooperate to satisfy this necessity — the individual cannot help but reach the erroneous conclusion that mail can be delivered only by governmental ‘masterminding.’
Testimony Galore:
If I, Pencil, were the only item that could offer testimony on what men and women can accomplish when free to try, then those with little faith would have a fair case. However, there is testimony galore; it’s all about us and on every hand. Mail delivery is exceedingly simple when compared, for instance, to the making of an automobile or a calculating machine or a grain combine or a milling machine or to tens of thousands of other things. Delivery? Why, in this area where men have been left free to try, they deliver the human voice around the world in less than one second; they deliver an event visually and in motion to any person’s home when it is happening; they deliver 150 passengers from Seattle to Baltimore in less than four hours; they deliver gas from Texas to one’s range or furnace in New York at unbelievably low rates and without subsidy; they deliver each four pounds of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard — halfway around the world — for less money than the government charges for delivering a one-ounce letter across the street!
The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited [free]. Merely organize society to act in harmony [peacefully] with this lesson. Let society’s legal apparatus [government] remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows [knowledge and education] freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth.
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( ‘I, Pencil’ – Afterword: By Milton Friedman, Nobel Laureate, 1976...
Leonard Read’s delightful story, ‘I, Pencil,’ has become a classic, and deservedly so. I know of no other piece of literature that so succinctly, persuasively, and effectively illustrates the meaning of both Adam Smith’s invisible hand — the possibility of cooperation without coercion — and Friedrich Hayek’s emphasis on the importance of dispersed knowledge and the role of the price system in communicating information that ‘will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do.’
We used Leonard’s story in our television show, ‘Free to Choose,’ and in the accompanying book of the same title to illustrate ‘the power of the market’ (the title of both the first segment of the TV show and of chapter one of the book). We summarized the story and then went on to say:
‘None of the thousands of persons involved in producing the pencil performed his task because he wanted a pencil. Some among them never saw a pencil and would not know what it is for. Each saw his work as a way to get the goods and services he wanted — goods and services we produced in order to get the pencil we wanted. Every time we go to the store and buy a pencil, we are exchanging a little bit of our services for the infinitesimal amount of services that each of the thousands contributed toward producing the pencil.
It is even more astounding that the pencil was ever produced. No one sitting in a central office gave orders to these thousands of people. No military police enforced the orders that were not given. These people live in many lands, speak different languages, practice different religions, may even hate one another — yet none of these differences prevented them from cooperating to produce a pencil. How did it happen? Adam Smith gave us the answer two hundred years ago.
‘I, Pencil’ is a typical Leonard Read product: imaginative, simple yet subtle, breathing the love of freedom that imbued everything Leonard wrote or did. As in the rest of his work, he was not trying to tell people what to do or how to conduct themselves. He was simply trying to enhance individuals’ understanding of themselves and of the system they live in.
That was his basic credo and one that he stuck to consistently during his long period of service to the public — not public service in the sense of government service. Whatever the pressure, he stuck to his guns, refusing to compromise his principles. That was why he was so effective in keeping alive, in the early days, and then spreading the basic idea that human freedom required private property, free competition, and severely limited government.)" - Leonard E. Read
(1898–1983), He established the Foundation for Economic Education in 1946. For the next 37 years he served as FEE’s president and labored tirelessly to promote and advance liberty. He was a natural leader who, at a crucial moment in American history, roused the forces defending individual freedom and private property.
His life is a testament to the power of ideas. As President Ronald Reagan wrote: ‘Our nation and her people have been vastly enriched by his devotion to the cause of freedom, and generations to come will look to Leonard Read for inspiration.’
Read was the author of 29 books and hundreds of essays. ‘I, Pencil,’ his most famous essay, was first published in 1958. In this essay’s fiftieth year anniversary a few of the manufacturing details and place names have changed, but the principles endure.
[http://www.fee.org/library/books/i-pencil-2/ ]
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"Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it." - Mikhail A. Bakunin
(1814-1876). Source: 'God and The State', 1871.
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"The point is, not how long you live, but how nobly you live." - Seneca
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"The real test of compassion is not what we say in abstract discussions but how we conduct ourselves in daily life." - The Dalai Lama
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"Every violation of truth [fraud] is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the [mental, intellectual, emotional, social and very often the physical and financial] health of human society." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"Never do anything against conscience, even if the state demands it." - Albert Einstein
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"An individual who breaks a law that his conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
American civil rights leader
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"When injustice becomes law, rebellion becomes duty." - Thomas Jefferson
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"[Individuality and being yourself:] Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth." - John F. Kennedy
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"[Individuality and being yourself:] The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will often be lonely, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." - Friedrich Nietzsche
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"None of us know all the potentialities that slumber in the spirit of the population, or all the ways in which that population can surprise us when there is the right interplay of events." - Václav Havel
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"Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations. Without internal peace, that is, peace among citizens and between the citizens and the state, there can be no guarantee of external peace." - Václav Havel
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"In contrast to the 'banality of evil,' which posits that ordinary people can be responsible for the most despicable acts of cruelty and degradation of their fellows, I posit the 'banality of heroism,' which unfurls the banner of the heroic Everyman and Everywoman who heed the call to service to humanity when their time comes to act. When that bell rings, they will know that it rings for them. It sounds a call to uphold what is best in human nature that rises above the powerful pressures of Situation and System as the profound assertion of human dignity opposing evil." - Philip Zimbardo
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"Evil is knowing better, but willingly doing worse." - Philip Zimbardo
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"States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions." - Noam Chomsky
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"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places-and there are so many-where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory." - Howard Zinn
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"The only way to abolish war is to make peace heroic." - John Dewey
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"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace." - Jimi Hendrix
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"What is a hero without love for mankind?" - Doris Lessing
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"To be in good moral condition requires at least as much training as to be in good physical condition." - Jawaharlal Nehru
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"Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of these acts, will be written the history of this generation." - Jeffrey Wigand
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"By giving the government unlimited powers,
the most arbitrary rule can be made legal;
and in this way a democracy may set up
the most complete despotism imaginable." - Friedrich August von Hayek
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974. Quote from his book, 'The Road to Serfdom'.
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"Crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant [to justify any evil he or she commits]." - James Madison
(1751-1836), Father of the Constitution for the USA and the 4th US President.
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"Statists relish 'crises' because they can be used to force more controls into our lives." - William P. Hoar
Quote from 'Tampering With the Markets', The New American, P. 13, June 10, 1996.
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"[In government] You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." - Rahm Emmanuel
(1959- ) Mayor of Chicago (2011- ), White House Chief of Staff to President Barack Obama (2009-2010), US Congressman (D-IL) (2004-2009), advisor to President Bill Clinton (1993-1998) Source: Wall Street Journal Digital Network, November 19, 2008.
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"Ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt of the [unalienable human] rights of man are the only causes of public misfortunes and of the corruption of governments." - French National Assembly
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"Our elections are free - it's in the results where eventually we pay." - Bill Stern
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