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Abdul-Hamid Ahmad Abu-Sulayman (Saudi leader of Islamic renewal [Tajdid] and professor, University of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia).  In Medinah, the Prophet provided that, in the just society every man has a right to capital without interest.… This means that in the pursuit of justice, the power of capital as well as the power of land are available to every member of society freely. The limits of differences are the limits imposed by the man’s own capacity to work and to use factors of production. [“The Theory of the Economics of Islam: The Economics of Tauhid and Brotherhood,” an English condensation of his book The Islamic Economic Theory, 1960.]

Acton, Lord (John E. E. Dalberg).  In every age its [liberty’s] progress has been beset by its natural enemies, by ignorance and superstition, by lust of conquest and by love of ease, by the strong man’s craving for power, and the poor man’s craving for food.  [The History of Freedom in Antiquity.]

Acton, Lord.  Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.  [Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887.]

Adams, Abigail.  I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature; and that power, whether vested in many or a few, is ever grasping, and like the grave, cries “Give, give!”  [Letter to John Adams,1774.]

Adams, Henry C.  As self-government was secured through a struggle for mastery over the public purse, so must it be maintained through the exercise by the people of complete control over public expenditure. Money is the vital principle of the body politic; the public treasury is the heart of the state; control over public supplies means control over public affairs. Any method of procedure, therefore, by which a public servant can veil the true meaning of his acts, or which allows the government to enter upon any great enterprise without bringing the fact fairly to the knowledge of the public, must work against the realization of the constitutional idea. This is exactly the state of affairs introduced by a free use of public credit. Under ordinary circumstances, popular attention can not be drawn to public acts, except they touch the pocket of the voters through an increase in taxes; and it follows that a government whose expenditures are met by resort to loans may, for a time, administer affairs independently of those who must finally settle the account.  [Public Debts, An Essay in the Science of Finance. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1898, pp. 22-23.]

Adams, Henry C.  The broad theory of constitutional liberty is that the people have the right to govern themselves; but the historical fact is that, in the attempt to realize this theory, the actual control of public affairs has fallen into the hands of those who possess property.  [Public Debts, An Essay in the Science of Finance. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1898, p. 9.]

Adams, Henry C.  The facts disclosed permit one to understand how deficit financiering, carried so far as to result in an interchange of capital and credit between peoples of varying grades of political advancement, must endanger the autonomy of weaker states unable to meet their debt-payments. Provided only that the interests involved are of sufficient importance to make diplomatic interference worth the while, the claims allowed by international law will certainly be urged against the delinquent states, and the citizens of such states may regard themselves fortunate if they succeed in maintaining their political integrity.  [Public Debts, An Essay in the Science of Finance. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1898, pp. 28-29.]

Adams, Henry C.   The great danger to self-government in the United States lies in municipal corruption, and municipal corruption is in large measure traceable to the manner in which cities have used their credit. For American readers, this reference to local government is a pertinent illustration of a most dangerous political tendency of deficit financiering.  [Public Debts, An Essay in the Science of Finance. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1898, p. 25.]

Adams, Henry C.  The tendency of foreign borrowing is in the same direction as that of domestic borrowing. As the latter obstructs the efficiency of constitutional methods, so the former tends to destroy the full autonomy of weak states. The granting of foreign credit is a first step toward the establishment of an aggressive foreign policy, and, under certain conditions, leads inevitably to conquest and occupation.  [Public Debts, An Essay in the Science of Finance. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1898, p. 25.]

Adams, John.  All men are born free and independent, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.  [George A. Peek, Jr., ed., The Political Writings of John Adams, New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1954, p. 96.]

Adams, John.  Property is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty. Perhaps, at first, prejudice, habit, shame or fear, principle or religion, would restrain the poor from attacking the rich, and the idle from usurping on the industrious; but the time would not be long before courage and enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees, to countenance the majority in dividing all the property among them, or at least, in sharing it equally with its present possessors. Debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavy on the rich, and not at all on others; and at last a downright equal division of every thing be demanded, and voted. What would be the consequence of this? The idle, the vicious, the intemperate, would rush into the utmost extravagance of debauchery, sell and spend all their share, and then demand a new division of those who purchased from them. The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.…   [The Works of John Adams, “A Defense of the Constitutions of Government in the United States of America,” by Charles Francis Adams, Vol. IX, Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, pp. 376-377.]

Adams, John.  Suppose a nation, rich and poor, high and low, ten millions in number, all assembled together; not more than one or two millions will have lands, houses, or any personal property; if we take into the account the women and children, or even if we leave them out of the question, a great majority of every nation is wholly destitute of property, except a small quantity of clothes, and a few trifles of other movables. Would Mr. Nedham be responsible that, if all were to be decided by a vote of the majority, the eight or nine millions who have no property, would not think of usurping over the rights of the one or two millions who have? Property is surely a right of mankind as really as liberty. Perhaps, at first, prejudice, habit, shame or fear, principle or religion, would restrain the poor from attacking the rich, and the idle from usurping on the industrious; but the time would not be long before courage and enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees, to countenance the majority in dividing all the property among them, or at least, in sharing it equally with its present possessors. Debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavy on the rich, and not at all on the others; and at last a downright equal division of every thing be demanded, and voted. What would be the consequence of this? The idle, the vicious, the intemperate, would rush into the utmost extravagance of debauchery, sell and spend all their share, and then demand a new division of those who purchased from them. The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If “Thou shalt not covet,” and “Thou shalt not steal,” were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society, before it can be civilized or made free.   [Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States, 1787; The Works of John Adams, edited by Charles Francis Adams. 10 vols. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1850-56.]

Adams, John.  Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist. But if unlimited or unbalanced power of disposing property, be put into the hands of those who have no property, France will find, as we have found, the lamb committed to the custody of the world. In such a case, all the pathetic exhortations and addresses of the national assembly to the people, to respect property, will be regarded no more than the warbles of the songsters of the forest. The great art of lawgiving consists in balancing the poor against the rich in the legislature, and in constituting the legislative a perfect balance against the executive power, at the same time that no individual or party can become its rival. The essence of a free government consists in an effectual control of rivalries.  [The Works of John Adams; Discourses on Davila: a Series of Papers on Political History, by Charles Francis Adams, Vol. IX, pp. 459-461.]

Adams, John.  The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist.  [The Works of John Adams, Charles Francis Adams, ed., 10 vols. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1850-56, 6:9, 280.]

Adams, John.  We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.  [Quoted in Fidelity magazine, February 1994, p. 26.]

Adams, John.  [W]e may…affirm that the balance of power in a society accompanies the balance of property in land. The only possible way, then, of preserving the balance of power on the side of liberty and public virtue is to make the acquisition of land easy to every member of society; to make a division of the land into small quantities, so that the multitude may be possessed of landed estates. If the multitude is possessed of the balance of real estate, the multitude will have the balance of power, and in that case the multitude will take care of the liberty, virtue, and interest of the multitude in all acts of government.  [Letter to James Sullivan, May 26, 1776.]

Adams, John.  I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.  [Letter to his wife Abigail; edited by Charles Francis Adams. May 12, 1780.]

Adams, Mildred [economist].  Our present inflation is the end result of wage costs having been pushed above market level…. Wage increases above market level (which is productivity level) result only in higher prices (or unemployment), giving government no choice but to turn the money crank sufficiently to cover the price rises. The expansion of the money supply causes the inflation which is now proceeding at an ever accelerating rate….turning off the money supply suddenly will not stop an inflation without severe unemployment, unless the prices of all factors in the market are flexible—which is no longer true since labor has the power to push wages ever upward….

Nor will coercive wage and price controls stop the inflation.

Nor will voluntary price control work unless labor unions willingly control wages, which they will not do unless assured of receiving a satisfactory quid pro quo….

Wage increases need to be brought within productivity increases…. [L]abor will cooperate fully only when it is given adequate incentive to do so…. [This] means profit sharing with the entire spectrum of workers included…. [P]rofit sharing would provide the grand alternative to Karl Marx, who wanted to destroy private ownership and deny man’s need to own things. Capitalism should provide the reverse: individual ownership for everyone, paid for out of his own productivity and in proportion to it.  [Needs citation.]

Adams, Samuel.  Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; secondly, to liberty; thirdly to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. Those are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.  [The Rights of the Colonists, 1772.]

Adams, Samuel.  [I]t is the greatest absurdity to suppose it in the power of one, or of any number of men, at the entering into society to renounce their essential natural rights, or the means of preserving those rights, when the grand end of civil government, from the very nature of its institution, is for the support, protection, and defence of those very rights; the principal of which, as is before observed, are life, liberty, and property. If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up an essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation. The right of freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave. [The Rights of the Colonists,” The Report of the Committee of Correspondence to the Boston Town Meeting, Nov. 20, 1772, Old South Leaflets no. 173 (Boston: Directors of the Old South Work, 1906) 7: 417-428.]

Adams, Samuel.  The Utopian schemes of leveling and a community of goods, are as visionary and impractical as those which vest all property in the Crown. [These ideas] are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government, unconstitutional.  [William V. Wells, The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams, 3 vols. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1865, 1:154.]

Adler, Mortimer J.  Emancipation of human labor from economic servitude and exploitation, i.e., from organizations of production in which the conditions of work are determined by a master class who own the means of production, and in which the fruits of work are alienated from workers to the benefit of masters.  [The Idea of Freedom, Doubleday, 1958, pp. 380-381.]

Adler, Mortimer J.  [P]olitical democracy cannot flourish under all economic conditions. Democracy requires an economic system which supports the political ideals of liberty and equality for all. Men cannot exercise freedom in the political sphere when they are deprived of it in the economic sphere.  John Adams and Alexander Hamilton observed that a man who is dependent for his subsistence on the arbitrary will of another man is not economically free and so should not be admitted to citizenship because he cannot use the political liberty which belongs to that status. If they had stated this point as a prediction, it would have been confirmed by later historic facts. The progressive political enfranchisement of the working classes has followed their progressive economic emancipation from slavery and serfdom, or from abject dependence on their employers.  [Preface by Adler in The Capitalist Manifesto, co-authored with Louis O.Kelso, Random House, 1958.]

Aesop.  Those who voluntarily put power into the hands of a tyrant or an enemy, must not wonder if it be at last turned against themselves.

Alexander, Dr. Leo.  Dictatorships can be indeed defined as systems in which there is a prevalence of thinking in destructive rather than in ameliorative terms in dealing with social problems. The ease with which destruction of life is advocated for those considered either socially useless or socially disturbing instead of educational or ameliorative measures may be the first danger sign of loss of creative liberty in thinking, which is the hallmarks of democratic society.  [“Medical Science Under Dictatorship,” New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 241, No. 2, July 14, 1949, p. 47.]

Alfonso X (the Wise).  [Tyrants] use their power against the people in three manners. The first is, that they strive that those under their mastery be ever ignorant and timorous, because, when they be such, they may not be bold to rise against them, nor to resist their wills; and the second is, that their victims be not kindly and united among themselves, in such wise that they trust not one another….; and the third way is, that they strive to make them poor, and to put them upon great undertakings, which they can never finish, whereby they may have so much harm that it may never come into their hearts to devise anything against their ruler.  [Las Siete Partidas.]

Alinsky, Saul.   [T]he organized labor movement as it is constituted today is as much a concomitant of a capitalist economy as is capital.  Organized labor is predicated upon the basic premise of collective bargaining between employers and employees.  This premise can obtain only for an employer-employee type of society.  If the labor movement is to maintain its own identity and security, it must of necessity protect that kind of society.  Radicals, on the other hand, want to advance from the jungle of laissez-faire capitalism to a world worthy of the name of human civilization.  They hope for a future where the means of economic production will be owned by all of the people instead of just a comparative handful.  They feel that this minority control of production facilities is injurious to the large masses of people not only because of economic monopolies but because the political power inherent in this form of centralized economy does not augur for an ever expanding democratic way of life.  [Reveille for Radicals, 1945.]

Anderson, Maxwell.  When a government takes over a people’s economic life it becomes absolute, and when it has become absolute it destroys the arts, the minds, the liberties and the meaning of the people it governs.  [The Guaranteed Life.]

Annius.   It is harder to keep provinces than obtain them; conquered by force, they are kept by justice. (Difficilius est provincias obtinere quam facere; viribus patrantur, iure retinentur.)  [Publius Annius Florus c. AD 74, Epitomæ de Tito Livio Bellorum Omnium Annorum DCC, Libri II, II, xxx, 29.]

Aquinas, Thomas.  Behold our refutation of the error. It is not based on documents of faith, but on the reasons and statements of the philosophers themselves. If then anyone there be who, boastfully taking pride in his supposed wisdom, wishes to challenge what we have written, let him not do it in some corner nor before children who are powerless to decide on such difficult matters. Let him reply openly if he dare. He shall find me there confronting him, and not only my negligible self, but many another whose study is truth. We shall do battle with his errors or bring a cure to his ignorance.  [St. Thomas Aquinas in response to Siger of Brabant’s attempt to base the law on faith rather than reason. Quoted in G. K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas: The “Dumb Ox.” New York: Doubleday and Company, 1956, 94.]

Araneta, Salvador.  The world of the seventies is an entirely new world from that of the thirties. Many revolutions have changed the political, social and economic conditions of peoples, changing many concepts out of recognition and making our world a fast-changing world. The more pertinent revolutions to our studies on Constitutional reforms are: 1) the scientific revolution…, 2) the revolution of equality of men and nations…, 3) the revolution of rising expectations, and 4) the fiscal, monetary and organizational revolution of Marx and Keynes which should evolve in the triumph of a more relevant revolution, that advocated by Kelso which envisions a political economy based on popular suffrage, popular education, and popular capitalism.  [Bayanikasan: The Effective Democracy for All, 1976.]

Arendt, Hannah.  Jefferson, though the secret vote was still unknown at the time had at least a foreboding of how dangerous it might be to allow the people to share a public power without providing them at the same time with more public space than the ballot box and with more opportunity to make their voices heard in public than on election day. What he perceived to be the mortal danger to the republic was that the Constitution had given all power to the citizens, without giving them the opportunity of being citizens and of acting as citizens.  [On Revolution.]

Arendt , Hannah.  Our problem today is not how to expropriate the expropriators but, rather, how to arrange matters so that the masses, dispossessed by industrial society in capitalist and socialist systems, can regain property. For this reason alone, the alternative between capitalism and socialism is false—not only because neither exists anywhere in its pure state anyhow, but because we have here twins, each wearing different hats.  [Essay, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution” in Crises of the Republic, 1969.]

Aristotle.  And what has come to prevail in democracies is the very reverse of beneficial, in those, that is, which are regarded as the most democratically run. The reason for this lies in the failure properly to define liberty. For there are two marks by which democracy is thought to be defined: “sovereignty of the majority” and “liberty.” “Just” is equated with what is equal, and the decision of the majority as to what is equal is regarded as sovereign; and liberty is seen in terms of doing what one wants. So in such a democracy each lives as he likes and for his “fancy of the moment,” as Euripides says. This is bad. It ought not to be regarded as slavery to live according to the constitution, but rather as self-preservation. [The Politics, Book V, Chapter ix, §1310a22.]

Aristotle.  Every effort therefore must be made to perpetuate prosperity. And, since that is to the advantage of the rich as well as the poor, all that accrues from the revenues should be collected into a single fund and distributed in block grants to those in need, if possible in lump sums large enough for the acquisition of a small piece of land, but if not, enough to start a business, or work in agriculture. And if that cannot be done for all, the distribution might be by tribes or some other division each in turn. The rich meanwhile will contribute funds sufficient to provide pay for the necessary meetings, being themselves relieved of all frivolous public services. It has been by running their constitution on some such lines that the Carthaginians have secured the goodwill of their people. From time to time they send some of them to live in the outlying districts and turn them into men of substance. When the notables are wise and considerate, they also split up the poor into groups and make it their business to provide them with a start in some occupation.  [The Politics, Book VI, Chapter v, §1320a35.]

Aristotle.  Men pay most attention to what is their own: they care less for what is common; or, at any rate, they care for it only to the extent to which each is individually concerned.  [The Politics, Chapter III.]

Aristotle.  Now property is part of a household, and the acquisition of property part of household-management; for neither life itself nor the good life is possible without a certain minimum supply of the necessities.  [The Politics, Book I, Chapter iv, §1253b23.]

Aristotle (rejecting the communism of Plato’s Republic).   Property should be in a general sense common, but as a general rule private…. In well-ordered states, although every man has his own property, some things he will place at the disposal of his friends, while of others he shares the use of them.  [The Politics.]

Aristotle.  Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.  [The Politics, Book I.]

Aristotle.  The first essential responsibility [of the state] is control of the market-place: there must be some official charged with the duty of seeing that honest dealing and good order prevail. For one of the well-nigh essential activities of all states is the buying and selling of goods to meet their mutual basic needs; this is the quickest way to self-sufficiency, which seems to be what moves men to combine under a single constitution. The Politics, Book VI, Chapter viii, §1321b4.

Aristotle.  Tools may be animate as well as inanimate; for instance, a ship’s captain uses a lifeless rudder, but a living man for watch; for a servant is, from the point of view of his craft, categorized as one of its tools. So any piece of property can be regarded as a tool enabling a man to live, and his property is an assemblage of such tools; a slave is a sort of living piece of property; and like any other servant is a tool in charge of other tools. For suppose that every tool we had could perform its task, either at our bidding or itself perceiving the need, and if—like the statues made by Dædalus or the tripods of Hephæstus, of which the poet says that “self-moved they enter the assembly of the gods” — shuttles in a loom could fly to and fro and a plectrum play a lyre all self-moved, then master-craftsmen would have no need of servants nor masters of slaves.  [The Politics. Book I, Chapter iv, §1253b23.]

Aristotle.  We must speak first about the division of land and about those who cultivate it: who should they be and what kind of person? We do not agree with those who have said that property should be communally owned, but we do believe that there should be a friendly arrangement for its common use, and that none of the citizens should be without means of support.  [The Politics, Book VII, Chapter X, §1329b36.]

Arizzmendiarrieta, Fr. Jose Maria.  One cannot think of a vigorous and expanding cooperative movement without its involvement in the field of credit….  [C]ooperativism lacking this resource is weak, necessarily fragile….  [C]redit is something like blood, the sap that must invigorate all members of the community.  [Quoted in Making Mondragon: The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex, by William Foote Whyte & Kathleen King Whyte, Cornell University Press, Ithaca & London, 1988.]

Atlantic Refining Corporation.  A century after Colonel Drake’s invention of the first successful oil well, only one percent of America’s physical work is done by man himself.

F. Augustine of Hippo, Saint.  To seek the greatest good is to live well, and to live well is nothing other than to love God with the whole heart, the whole soul, and the whole mind: It is therefore obvious that this love must be kept whole and uncorrupt, that is temperance; it should not be overcome with difficulties, that is fortitude, it must not be subservient to anything else, that is justice; it must discriminate among things so as not to be deceived by falsity or fraud, that is prudence. (Summum bonum appetere est bene vivere, ut nihil sit aliud bene vivere, quam toto corde, tota anima, tota mente Deum diligere: a quo exsistit, ut incorruptus in eo amor atque integer custodiatur, quod est temperantiæ; et nullis frangatur incommodis, quod est fortitudinis; nulli alii serviat, quod est iustitiæ; vigilet in descernendis rebus, ne fallacia paulatim dolusve subrepat, quod est prudentiæ.)  [De moribus ecclesiæ catholicæ, 1, 3, 6., Fifth Century.]

Augustine, Saint.  Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms.  [The City of God, Book IV, Fifth Century.]

Aviles, Leonidas R.  This is not a utopian concept….The prospects for unleashing economic development and eliminating “give away” under the technique of [Louis Kelso’s] Second-Income Plan has enormous possibility for developing countries.  [A New Focus on Economic Development, El Universo, Guayaquil, Ecuador, April 1, 1969.]

Bacon, Francis.  He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils.

Bagehot, Walter.  One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.  [Physics and Politics.]

Bailey, H. C.  The origin of civilization is man’s determination to do nothing for himself which he can get done for him.

Bailey, Dr. Norman A. (consulting economist and former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan for International Economic Affairs).  Central bank functions and operations are widely misunderstood, not only by the public in general but also by many financial and economic professionals.  The Federal Reserve system operates in such a way that it makes no contribution whatever to the spread of ownership of productive assets among the population.  Indeed, its policies have tended to concentrate economic power by restricting credit to those with an existing asset base and by maintaining an interest rate structure designed to reward speculation and discourage productive entrepreneurship.  [“Fed Should Share the Wealth,” The Journal of Commerce, May 15, 1989.]

Bailey, Dr. Norman A.  The problem with monetary economists is that they don’t understand money.  [1988.]

Bakunin, Mikhail.  Collective property and individual property, these two banners will be the standards under which, from now on, the great battles of the future will be fought.  [From The Great Quotations, George Seldes, ed.]

Bakunin, Mikhail.  Collective property and individual property, these two banners will be the standards under which, from now on, the great battles of the future will be fought.  [From The Great Quotations, George Seldes, ed.]

Baruch, Bernard.  Society can progress only if men’s labors show a profit—if they yield more than is put in. To produce at a loss must leave less for all to share.  [Baruch: My Own Story, 1957.]

Bastiat, Frederic. We hold from God the gift which includes all others. This gift is life — physical, intellectual, and moral life.

But life cannot maintain itself alone. The Creator of life has entrusted us with the responsibility of preserving, developing, and perfecting it. In order that we may accomplish this, He has provided us with a collection of marvelous faculties. And He has put us in the midst of a variety of natural resources. By the application of our faculties to these natural resources we convert them into products, and use them. The process is necessary in order that life may run its appointed course.

Life, faculties, production — in other words, individuality, liberty, property — this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it.

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed before-hand that caused men to make laws in the first place.  [The Law. Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., 1974, pp. 5-6.]

Beecher, Henry Ward.  A tool is but the extension of a man’s hand and a machine is but a complex tool; and he that invents a machine augments the power of man and the well-being of mankind. [Needs citation.]

Bellermine, St. Robert.  It depends on the consent of the people to decide whether kings or consuls or other magistrates are to be established in authority over them, and if there is legitimate cause, the people can change a kingdom into an aristocracy, or an aristocracy into a democracy, and vice versa, as we read was done in Rome.  [De Laicis.]

Bellermine, St. Robert.  Political rule is so natural and necessary to the human race that it cannot be withdrawn without destroying nature itself; for the nature of man is such that he is a social animal.  [De Laicis.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  But if we are to retain freedom, then we can only do so by keeping the determining mass of the citizens the possessors of property with personal control over it, as individuals or as families. For property is the necessary condition of economic freedom in the full sense of that term. He that has not property is under economic servitude to him who has property, whether the possessor of it be another individual or the State.  [The Crisis of Civilization, Being the Matter of a Course of Lectures Delivered at Fordham University, 1937. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 145.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  But though Usury is in itself immoral, and justly condemned by every ethical code, its chief and worst defect in the particular case we are now examining, the growth of Capitalism and its increasing proletariat, is the centralization of irresponsible control over the lives of men: the putting power over the proletariat into the hands of a few who can direct the loans of currency and credit without which that proletariat could not be fed and clothed and maintained in work.  [The Crisis of Civilization, Being the Matter of a Course of Lectures Delivered at Fordham University, 1937. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 124.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  Capitalism had arisen through the misuse and exaggeration of certain rights, notably the right of property — the basis of economic freedom — and the right of contract, which is one of the main functions of economic freedom. Therefore, even under Capitalism, so long as the old principles were remembered it was possible to recall the principles whereby Society had once been sane and well ordered. But as a Godless greed pursued its career from excess to excess, it provoked a sort of twin hostile brother, equally Godless, born in the same atmosphere of utter disregard for the foundational virtues of humility and charity. This hostile twin brother of Capitalism was destined to be called Communism, and is today setting out to murder its elder.  [The Crisis of Civilization, Being the Matter of a Course of Lectures Delivered at Fordham University, 1937. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 152.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  Capitalism is an evil not because it defends the legal right to property, but because it is of its nature the use of that legal right for the defense of a privileged few against a much greater number who, though free and equal citizens, are without economic basis of their own. Therefore the root evil which we roughly term “Capitalism:” should more accurately be termed “Proletarianism”; for the characteristic of the bad state of Society which we call today “Capitalist,” is not the fact that the few own, but the fact that the man, though politically equal to their masters and free to exercise all the functions of a citizen, cannot enjoy full economic freedom.  [The Crisis of Civilization, Being the Matter of a Course of Lectures Delivered at Fordham University, 1937. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 139.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  Communism worked honestly by officials devoid of human frailties and devoted to nothing but the good of its slaves, would have certain manifest material advantages as compared with a proletarian wage-system where millions live in semi-starvation, and many millions more in permanent dread thereof. But even if it were administered thus Communism would only produce its benefits through imposing slavery.  [The Great Heresies. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 151.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  Consider in what way the industrial system developed upon capitalist lines. Why were a few rich men put with such ease into possession of the new methods? Why was it normal and natural in their eyes and in that of contemporary society that those who produced the new wealth with the new machinery should be proletarian and dispossessed? Simply because the England upon which the new discoveries had come was already an England in which perhaps half of the whole population was proletarian, and a medium for exploitation ready to hand. When any one of the new industries was launched it had to be capitalized; that is, accumulated wealth from some source or other had to be found which would support labor in the process of production until that process should be complete. Someone must find the corn and the meat and the housing and the clothing by which should be supported, between the extraction of the raw material and the moment when the consumption of the finished article could begin, the human agents which dealt with that raw material and turned it into the finished product. Had property been well distributed, protected by cooperative guilds, fenced round and supported by custom and by the autonomy of great artisan corporations, those accumulations of wealth, necessary for the launching of each new method of production and for each new perfection of it, would have been discovered in the mass of small owners. Their corporations, their little parcels of wealth combined would have furnished the capitalization required for the new processes, and men already owners would, as one invention succeeded another, have increased the total wealth of the community without disturbing the balance of distribution. There is no conceivable link in reason or in experience which binds the capitalization of a new process with the idea of a few employing owners and a mass of employed nonowners working at a wage. Such great discoveries coming in a society like that of the thirteenth century would have blest and enriched mankind. Coming upon the diseased moral conditions of the eighteenth century in this country, they proved a curse.  [The Servile State. Section 4, “How the Distributive State Failed.” Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund Classics, 1977, pp. 100-101.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  Coupled with Usury, Unrestricted Competition destroys the small man for the profit of the great and in so doing produces that mass of economically unfree citizens whose very political freedom comes in question because it has no foundation in any economic freedom, that is, any useful proportion of property to support it. Political freedom without economic freedom is almost worthless, and it is because the modern proletariat has the one kind of freedom without the other that its rebellion is now threatening the very structure of the modern world.  [The Crisis of Civilization, Being the Matter of a Course of Lectures Delivered at Fordham University, 1937. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 133.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  Political freedom without economic freedom is almost worthless, and it is because the modern proletariat has the one kind of freedom without the other that its rebellion is now threatening the very structure of the modern world.  [The Crisis of Civilization, Being the Matter of a Course of Lectures Delivered at Fordham University, 1937. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 133.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  Economic freedom is in our eyes a good. It is among the highest of temporal goods because it is necessary to the highest life of society through the dignity of man and through the multiplicity of his action, in which multiplicity is life. Through well-divided property alone can the units of society react upon the State. Through it alone can a public opinion flourish. Only where the bulk of the cells are healthy can the whole organism thrive. It is therefore our business to restore economic freedom through the restoration of the only institution under which it flourishes, which institution is Property. The problem before us is, how to restore Property so that it shall be, as it was not so long ago, a general institution.  [The Restoration of Property. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1936, p. 27.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  Even if the wealth and power be well distributed throughout a community, its members will not be happy unless they are inwardly so, and obviously where the distribution is bad, where the few have a vast superfluity and the many are consumed by anxiety or want, or where a few controllers can exercise their will over the many, society has failed, even though its total wealth and power be increased.  [Survivals and New Arrivals: The Old and New Enemies of the Catholic Church. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1992, p. 45.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  Had there been any existent vital and energetic institution left in Society after the Reformation for the use of small property in coordinated form—that is, in combination, so that the average man’s holding could be put to useful purpose in company with the holdings of a great number of other men of his own sort, the new evils would not have arisen.  [The Crisis of Civilization, Being the Matter of a Course of Lectures Delivered at Fordham University, 1937. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 134.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  In the effort to restore private property as a general institution normal to the family and giving its tone to the whole State, we must remember one very grievous proviso: the task is impossible unless there be still left in the mass of men a sufficient desire for economic independence to urge them towards its attainment. You can give political independence by a stroke of the pen, you can declare slaves to be free or give the vote to men who have hitherto had no vote, but you cannot give property to men or families as a permanent possession unless they desire economic freedom sufficiently to be willing to undertake its burdens.  [The Crisis of Civilization, Being the Matter of a Course of Lectures Delivered at Fordham University,1937. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 174.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  In the form of security and sufficiency for the men who labor to the profit of others, and in the form of registering and controlling them in the form of an organized public supervision of their labor, slavery is already afoot. When slavery shall succeed it will succeed through the acquiescence of those who will be enslaved, for they will prefer sufficiency and security with enslavement, to freedom, responsibility, insecurity and the threat of insufficiency.  [“The New Paganism,” Essays of a Catholic. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1992, p. 8.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  In the same way the eminence attaching to the mere possession of great wealth disappoints us nine times out of ten, especially if the wealth has been accumulated rapidly. For great wealth is accumulated rapidly by cunning or chance, or a mixture of the two. Cunning has nothing to do with high qualities; it is rather a presumption against them; while chance has nothing to do with them either. Therefore it is that men are always complaining after meeting So-and-so, that he seemed to be astonishingly stupid, though he made a million in ten years and started as a pauper. Most such men are stupid, compared with what we expect of them, but they are not stupider than the run of men; it is only the contrast between what they are and what we expected to find in them which makes us emphasize their very normal and average lack of parts.  [“Science as the Enemy of Truth,” Essays of a Catholic. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1992, p. 170.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  It is Mind which determines the change of Society, and it was because the mind at work was a Catholic mind that the slave became a serf and was on his way to becoming a peasant and a fully free man—a man free economically as well as politically. The whole spirit of the Church was for small property, and that spirit was slowly, instinctively, working for the establishment of small property throughout Christendom. It was small property subject to servitudes, paying heavy dues to others; but it was small property just the same, and it had struck permanent root.  [The Crisis of Civilization, Being the Matter of a Course of Lectures Delivered at Fordham University, 1937. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 57.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  Let us then repeat and firmly fix this main point: the evil, the root evil, of that to which the term Capitalism has come to be applied, is neither its functioning for profit nor its dependence upon legally protected private property; but the presence of a Proletariat, that is of men possessing political freedom, but dispossessed of economic freedom, and existing in such large numbers in any community as to determine the tone of all that community.  [The Crisis of Civilization, Being the Matter of a Course of Lectures Delivered at Fordham University, 1937. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 141.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  Ownership by delegation is a contradiction in terms. When men say, for instance (by a false metaphor), that each member of the public should feel himself an owner of public property—such as a Town Park—and should therefore respect it as his own, they are saying something which all our experience proves to be completely false. No man feels of public property that it is his own; no man will treat it with the care of the affection of a thing which is his own; still less can a man express himself through the use of a thing which is not his own, but shared in common with a mass of other men.  [The Restoration of Property. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1936, p. 24.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  Since it is to the advantage of the wage-payer to pay as little as possible, even well-paid labor will have no more than what is regarded in a particular society as the reasonable level of subsistence. The lower ranks of labor will commonly have less, and if public relief were afforded even up to the wage-level of the lowest ranks of labor, that relief would compete in the labor market; check or dry up the supply of wage-labor. It would tend to render the performance of work by the wage-earner redundant; for if relief were on a scale approaching regular wages, the average man would not do work for a sum which he could obtain without working.  [The Crisis of Civilization, Being the Matter of a Course of Lectures Delivered at Fordham University, 1937. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 143.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  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 Faith and Capitalism,” Essays of a Catholic. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1992, p. 226.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  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. The Crisis of Civilization, Being the Matter of a Course of Lectures Delivered at Fordham University, 1937. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 125.

Belloc, Hilaire.  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 Restoration of Property. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1936, p. 45.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  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.  [The Restoration of Property. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1936, p. 42.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  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 New Paganism,” Essays of a Catholic. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1992, p. 9.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  The Reformation has been called in a biting epigram “a rising of the rich against the poor.  [The Crisis of Civilization, Being the Matter of a Course of Lectures Delivered at Fordham University, 1937. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 109.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  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.  [The Crisis of Civilization, Being the Matter of a Course of Lectures Delivered at Fordham University, 1937. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 146.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  The smaller man approaching our modern banking system, which controls all issue of credit and therefore pretty well all our industrial and commercial activities, is not what the controllers of that credit call “interesting.” He borrows with difficulty and upon high terms, and must pledge security out of all proportion to that which his richer rival has to put down. 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.  [The Crisis of Civilization, Being the Matter of a Course of Lectures Delivered at Fordham University, 1937. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 132.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  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 Crisis of Civilization, Being the Matter of a Course of Lectures Delivered at Fordham University, 1937. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 108.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  The State, in handing over money for a particular purpose — to wit: education — has a right to ask that it should be spent upon the purposes named. If it be a free gift, it has also the right to limit the application thereof. But here there is no question. It is not a free gift; it is a payment made as of right. It is a debt. The State says: “You must spend so much money on education, which you as taxpayers must supply.” We answer: “Then we must receive that money which we have given you back from you for that purpose. We WILL spend it upon education — and you, the State, have a right to see that it is spent upon education and not upon sweetmeats or fireworks. But you cannot, merely because it proceeds from yourself, profess a natural right to make the expenditure of it conform exactly to what you yourself approve.  [“The Schools,” Essays of a Catholic. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1992, p. 189.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  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.  [Survivals and New Arrivals: The Old and New Enemies of the Catholic Church. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1992, p. 84.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  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.  [The Crisis of Civilization, Being the Matter of a Course of Lectures Delivered at Fordham University, 1937. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 153.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  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.  [The Servile State. Section 1, “Definitions” Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund Classics, 1977, p. 46.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  Under the old social philosophy which had governed the Middle Ages, temporal, and therefore all economic, activities were referred to an eternal standard. The production of wealth, it distribution and exchange were regulated with a view to securing the Christian life of Christian men. In two points especially was this felt: First in securing the independence of the family, which can only be done by the wide distribution of property, in others words the prevention of the growth of a proletariat; secondly, in the close connection between wealth and public function. Under the old philosophy which had governed the high Middle Ages things had been everywhere towards a condition of Society in which property was well distributed throughout the community, and thus the family rendered independent.  [The Crisis of Civilization, Being the Matter of a Course of Lectures Delivered at Fordham University, 1937. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 107.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  We cannot make owners by merely giving men something to own. And, I repeat, whether there be sufficient desire for property left upon which we can work, only experience can decide. [The Restoration of Property. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1936, p. 35.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  What the power to obtain credit (especially, of course, bank credit), means to-day we shall discuss when we come to examine the part played by finance in industrial Capitalism; but we note here that the advantage enjoyed in this department by the larger unit is, again, as in the other instances given, out of proportion to the size of the units engaged. The small craftsman can hardly borrow at all—perhaps a few pounds privately at ruinous interest. The somewhat larger man can borrow more, in proportion, upon the security of his business, but he is not “interesting” to the banker. The owner—or controller—of a very large business can borrow on quite another scale. He does not command, say, ten times the credit of a rival with a tenth of his business; he commands twenty or thirty times the amount and on easier terms.  [The Restoration of Property. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1936, p. 50.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  When the mass of families in a State are without property, then those who were once citizens become virtually slaves. The more the State steps in to enforce conditions of security and sufficiency; the more it regulates wages, provides compulsory insurance, doctoring, education, and in general takes over the lives of the wage-earners, for the benefit of the companies and men employing the wage-earners, the more is this condition of semi-slavery accentuated.  [The Great Heresies. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 150.]

Belloc, Hilaire. When the mass of men are dispossessed — own nothing — they become wholly dependent upon the owners; and when those owners are in active competition to lower the cost of production the mass of men whom they exploit not only lack the power to order their own lives, but suffer from want and insecurity as well.  [The Great Heresies. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 149.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  Wherever the Industrial system has reached its second generation it is threatened by two mortal perils. The first is the demand by an organized proletariat for sustenance without relation to the product of its labor; a demand which threatens the very existence of PROFIT (on the necessary presumption of which Capitalism reposes). The second, and immediately graver danger is that of a revolt for the confiscation of the means of production.  [Survivals and New Arrivals: The Old and New Enemies of the Catholic Church. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1992, p. 52.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  [T]he terror in which English capitalists now stand of organized proletarian resistance gives to the naturally protected craft organizations the power to receive the wages they demand. They act as they have been trained to act by capitalist society, which denies the doctrine of the Just Price, which proclaims work to be an evil and the goal of human endeavor to be the avoidance of it; which puts it up as an ideal that individuals should get as much money as they possibly can out of their fellows by any means in their power.  [“The Faith Through the Press,” Essays of a Catholic. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1992, pp. 135-136.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  [W]e may not say to the poor: “You have a right to fight the rich merely because they are rich and in order to make yourselves less poor.” We may say: “You have a right to fight to prevent the conditions of your life becoming inhuman,” but we may not say, “You have a right to fight merely because you desire to have more and your opponent to have less.”  [“The Faith and Capitalism,” Essays of a Catholic. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1992, p. 224.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  Industrial Capitalism may be defined as the corruption of a system which has always been admitted by European men — the system of private property. It has flourished under the protection which law and custom have extended to private property in essence, yet it has degraded property, allowing the swallowing up of the small man by the big one and the concentration of control in few and unworthy hands. Nevertheless, from the idea of private property did it spring, and by the remaining sanctity of private property is it protected. So also is it with that accompaniment of private property as an institution, the freedom of the family and the individual; freedom to make contracts and decide upon one’s own activities. The great proletarian body of working men, now in such violent protest against the capitalist system, owe their existence to such freedom — though by the very exercise of that freedom they have largely lost it. They were free to accept such and such wages, or to refuse them; to drive their own bargain; in practice this has reduced them to the half-slavery we see around us. But freedom is still our social theory — and by its very operation we are creating those great monopolies which are the negation of freedom. Most men who protest against modern capitalism would still preserve property and freedom. Some, more clear-sighted than the rest, demand reforms which shall re-establish the old freedom and the old well-divided property among men and undo the evils of modern capitalism by returning to what were always the first principles of our civilization. But there is another spirit abroad which would undo the evils of capitalism by destroying the right to property and by destroying freedom. It would vest control in the officers of the State, reducing all men to a common slavery for the advantage of equal distribution and for ending the existing injustice. That demand, growing in volume, successfully rooted at last in one great state — Russia — made openly by small well-organized minorities on every side, threatens the very nature of our society: and against the Communist and his ideal society is now at war.  [Cranmer: Archbishop of Canterbury 1533 – 1556. Philadelphia & London: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1931, pp. 58-59.]

Belloc, Hilaire.  Protest against Industrial Capitalism from one aspect or another is universal: so was the protest against the condition of European religion at the beginning of the sixteenth century. One man in one mood will attack Industrial Capitalism for its destruction of beauty; another for its incompetence; another for the vileness of the men who chiefly prosper under it; another for its mere confusion and noise; another for its false values; it was until recently most fiercely attacked for its impoverishment of the workers, its margin of unemployment and the rest — indeed so fiercely that it was compelled to seek palliatives for the evil. With a mass of men it was attacked from a vague but strong sense of injustice; it allowed a few rich to exploit mankind.

In the midst of all these innumerable forms of a common protest and universal ill-ease there has grown up one definite body of doctrine whose adherents are called Communists and who desired the total subversion of what had been, hitherto unquestioned among civilized European men, the general doctrines of property and individual freedom.  [Hilaire Belloc, Cranmer: Archbishop of Canterbury 1533 – 1556. Philadelphia & London: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1931, p. 56.]

Benton, Senator Thomas Hart.  Tenantry is unfavorable to freedom. It lays the foundation for separate orders in society, annihilates the love of country, and weakens the spirit of independence. The tenant has in fact no country, no hearth, no domestic altar, no household god. The freeholder, on the contrary, is the natural supporter of a free government, and it should be the policy of republics to multiply their freeholders, as it is the policy of monarchies to multiply tenants. We are a republic, and we wish to continue so: then multiply the class of freeholders; pass the public lands cheaply and easily into the hands of the people; sell, for a reasonable price, to those who are able to pay; and give, without price, to those who are not. I say give without price, to those who are not able to pay; and that which is so given, I consider as sold for the best of prices; for a price above gold and silver; a price which cannot be carried away by delinquent officers, nor lost in failing banks, nor stolen by thieves, nor squandered by an improvident and extravagant administration. It brings a price above rubies — a race of virtuous and independent farmers, the true supporters of their country, and the stock from which its best defenders must be drawn.  [Congressional Globe, 19th Congress, 1st session, 1826, pp. 127-128.]

Berkeley Daily Gazette.  Louis O. Kelso, possibly the only genuine revolutionary in the United States. July 16, 1971.

Berkeley Daily Gazette.  We believe that “Kelsonian economics”… constitutes a revolution in economic thinking, and a possible channel for the real American revolution that needs to be undertaken.… The economic emancipation of the vast majority of citizens not through redistributing other people’s wealth…but through the creation of new wealth and new ownership…. The real revolution in the United States economically is to make operative the promise of capitalism for the masses instead of building the wealth of a few at the expense of the many.  [Editorial, “For A REAL Berkeley Revolution — Individual Ownership for All,” November 23, 1970.]

Bible. But the wise shall shine brightly like the splendor of the firmament, and those who lead the many to justice shall be like the stars forever. (Qui autem docti fuerint, fulgebunt quasi splendor firmamenti; et que ad iustitiam erudiunt multos, quasi stellæ in perpetuas æternitates.)   [Daniel 12:3.]

Bill of Rights.  No person shall…be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor shall property be taken for public use, without just compensation.  [Article V, December 15, 1791.]

Blackstone, Sir William.  And these [great natural rights] may be reduced to three principal or primary articles: the right of personal security; the right of personal liberty; and the right of private property; because as there is no other known method of compulsion, or of abridging man’s natural free will, but by an infringement or diminution of one or other of these important rights, the preservation of these, inviolate, may justly be said to include the preservation of our civil immunities in their largest and most extensive sense.  [Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England. 1:219-20.]

Blake, William.  He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer; for Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars. [Needs citation.]

Boyd, Winnett, and Kiernan, John.  One of the persistent myths (of the labor movement) is that labor is striving for a fair share of what it helps to produce. Instead it is, unwittingly, striving for subservience (to the machine).… The challenge facing labor is to become involved in the process of new capital formation. The new dimension in labor activity should be to marshal (its forces) for a direct individual participation in the ownership of productive capital….  [The (Toronto) Telegram, March 21, 1967.]

Brandeis, Louis D.  It is one of the greatest economic errors to put any limitation upon production…. We have not the power to produce more than there is a potential to consume.  [Testimony, U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, 1915.]

Brandeis, Louis D.  The greatest factors making for communism, socialism or anarchy among a free people are the excesses of capital. The talk of the agitator does not advance socialism one step. The great captains of industry and finance…are the chief makers of socialism.  [Edited by Solomon Goldman, 1954.]

Brandeis, Louis D.  We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few — but we can’t have both.  [Labor, October 17, 1941.]

Brandeis, Louis D.  We gain nothing by trading the tyranny of capital for the tyranny of labor. Edited by Solomon Goldman, 1954.

Brohawn, Dawn Kurland.  Without the spirit of Charity — Love that seeks the good of others and of human society  — guiding us in a never-ending pursuit of Justice, our limited, imperfect conceptions and applications of Justice soon descend into legalism, and, unable to keep pace with changing social conditions, decay into injustice. April 13, 2005.

Brohawn, Rowland.  The rich and poor have something in common. They both under-consume.  [Conversation with Dawn K. Brohawn about Binary Economics, September 2012.]

Brohawn, Rowland (on the lack of moral imagination and systemic economic solutions presented by the presidential candidates and their advisors).  What we have here is a failure to imaginate.  [During the U.S. presidential campaign, October 2008.]

Brown, Hon. Edmund G. (Governor of California). 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.  [Needs citation.]

Brown, Jerry The whole Jeffersonian ideal was that people are temporarily in government. Government is not the basic reality. People are. The private sector. And government is just a limited power to make things go better.  [Needs citation.]

Brownson, Orestes A.  If there must always be a laboring population distinct from proprietors and employers, we regard the slave system as decidedly preferable to the system at wages.  [Boston Quarterly, July, 1840.]

Brownson, Orestes A. Wages is a cunning device of the devil, for the benefit of tender consciences, who would retain all the advantages of the slave system, without the expense, trouble, and odium of being slave-holders.  [Boston Quarterly, July, 1840.]

Brownson, Orestes.  The laws in a democracy are always true exponents of the character, the tastes, habits, and passions of the people. The dominant passion of our people at the present moment is the acquisition of material wealth, either for its own sake, or for the sake of the ease, independence, and distinction it is supposed to be able to secure. Take any ten thousand men at random, and ask them what they most desire of government, and they will answer you, if they answer you honestly, —  Such laws as will facilitate the acquisition of wealth. The facilitating of the acquisition of wealth is at the bottom of every question which has any bearing on our elections. Let these men vote, and they will vote for such laws as they believe will most effectually secure this end. But suppose such laws to be enacted, how many out of the ten thousand will be in a condition to take advantage of them? Certainly, not more than one in a hundred. There will be, then, nine thousand and nine hundred men joining with one hundred to enact laws which in their operation are for the exclusive benefit of the one hundred. The whole action, the inevitable action, of every popular government, where wealth is the dominant passion of the people, is to foster the continued growth of inequality of property. The tendency of all laws passed, if passed by the many, will be to concentrate the property in the hands of the few, because each one who aids in passing them hopes that his will be the hands in which it is to be concentrated; — at least, such will be the tendency, till matters become so bad that the many in their madness and desperation are driven to attempt the insane remedy of agrarian laws [redistribution of landed property /so as to achieve a uniform division of land — OED]. When, under our new system of industry, which allows little personal intercourse between landlord and tenant, proprietor and operative, which connects the operative simply with the mill and the overseer, the concentration of property in a few hands becomes general, it involves the most fatal results.  [Brownson’s Quarterly Review, January, 1846.]

Brownson, Orestes A.  The United States, or the American Republic, has a mission, and is chosen of God for the realization of a great idea. It has been chosen not only to continue the work assigned to Greece and Rome, but to accomplish a greater work than was assigned to either. In art, it will prove false to its mission if it do not rival Greece; and in science and philosophy, if it do not surpass it. In the State, in law, in jurisprudence, it must continue and surpass Rome. Its idea is liberty, indeed, but liberty with law, and law with liberty. Yet its mission is not so much the realization of liberty as the realization of the true idea of the State, which secures at once the authority of the public and the freedom of the individual — the sovereignty of the people without social despotism, and individual freedom without anarchy. In other words, its mission is to bring out in its life the dialectic union of authority and liberty, of the natural rights of man and those of society.   [“Introduction”, The American Republic, 1865.]

Bryce, James  The tendency everywhere in America to concentrate power and responsibility in one man is unmistakable. The American Commonwealth.

Buckley, Senator James.  [I]n the view of the Founding Fathers of this country, a widespread distribution of property ownership was essential to the preservation of individual liberty and a republican form of government. In their day, of course, they assumed that the seemingly limitless land of the new nation afforded the opportunity for every man to own a freehold farm.

Some, however, looked ahead to the important role of property ownership in preserving the American experiment in a distant day and age, when America would lose its predominately agricultural character. As James Madison said in 1787:

In future times a great majority of the people will not only be without land, but without any sort of property. These will either combine under the influence of their common situation; in which case the rights of property and the public liberty will not be secure in their hands, or, which is more probable, they will become the tools of opulence and ambition; in which case there will be equal danger on another side.

Today, of course, America has come a long way from its origins as a nation of Jeffersonian yeomen.

As we became urbanized and industrialized, we tended to lose sight of the importance of widespread property ownership. No longer can we return, as a people, to an 18th century way of life. Yet we should remember that private property is an indispensable part of the foundation of a free country. As time and technology advance, we need to reshape the Founding Fathers’ idea of the importance of widespread property ownership to fit new circumstances. This is particularly true in a Nation in which millions of families now have no ownership stake in anything greater than a television set or secondhand automobile.  [Congressional Record, June 8, 1971, p. S8483.]

Buckley, William F., Jr.  A capitalist is someone who derives a substantial share of his income from his equity in producing companies. On this scale the figures are discouraging. Approximately ninety percent of the capital of this country is owned by five or less percent of the American people.

Louis Kelso of San Francisco, a lawyer-economist, has for years felt that he has a radical answer to the problem.  [National Review, February 24, 1970.]

Buckley, William F., Jr.  Although it is capitalist theory that the consumer need not own the tools of production in order to profit from capitalism, still it is desirable that the ownership of production should be as widespread as possible. There is a reading of the situation that calls every family that owns a house or an insurance policy a capitalist but that is, really, verbal trickery. Approximately ninety percent of the capital of this country is owned by five or less percent of the American people…. Kelso is a serious man, and his idea is engaging….The objective [of enabling everyone to become shareowners] is surely right….  [National Review, February 24, 1970.]

Burke, Edmund. All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. [A re-phrasing of the quote, “When bad people combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”]  [Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, April 23, 1770.]

Burke, Edmund.  There is but one law for all; namely, that law which governs all law — the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity; the law of nature and of nations.  [January 9, 1795. Needs citation.]

Burke, Edmund.  Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist.  [Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, April 3, 1777.]

Burke, Edmund.  As wealth is power, so all power must infallibly draw wealth to itself by some means or other.  [Commons, February 11, 1780.]

Burke, Edmund.  Slavery they can have anywhere.  It is a weed that grows in every soil.  [Second Speech on Conciliation with America.  The Thirteen Resolutions.]

Burke, Edmund.   Power gradually extirpates from the mind every humane and gentle virtue.  [A Vindication of Natural Society, 1756.]

Burke, Edmund.  The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself.  [Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790.]

Burke, Edmund.  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. [Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790.]

Burnham, Daniel (American architect and city planner).  Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistence. Remember that our sons and our grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty.  [Quoted in Daniel H. Burnham, Architect, Planner of Cities. Vol. 2, Chapter XXV, “Closing in 1911-1912,” p. 147.]

Business and Society.  Every company sensitive to the need for innovative solutions to our problems owes it to itself to look at Kelso’s ideas.  [January 13, 1970.]

Butler, Samuel.  All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

Byrnes, James F.  Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death.

Califano, Joseph (Secretary, U.S. Department of Housing, Education and Welfare).  There are no free lunches on welfare.  [May, 1977. Needs citation.]

Camus, Albert.  Without work all life goes rotten, But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.

Canada Month.  Within Kelso’s quite logical but revolutionary concepts lie the mechanism for freeing Canada of the need for foreign capital without directing one iota of discrimination against that which is already here or which could come in the future.  [May 1967.]

Capon, Frank S. (Financial Vice President, Du Pont of Canada Limited).  [T]hose who urge increasing redistribution of wealth are not doing so because they reject freedom. They are sincerely seeking ways to eliminate poverty, and because they are sincere I expect them to give serious consideration to the freedom route to prosperity…. I am satisfied that Kelso’s theories are correct, and that this is the solution that we shall have to adopt if we are to avoid the unthinkable alternative [the elimination of freedom].  [Speech before the 39th Annual Meeting of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Calgary, Alberta, October 1968.]

Capone, Al. (crime boss).  The American system of ours, call it Americanism, call it Capitalism, call it what you like, gives each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it.  [1929 interview, quoted by Claud Cockburn, In Time of Trouble, 1956.]

Carnegie, Andrew (1835 – 1919. Scottish-born U.S. industrialist and philanthropist).  Aim for the highest.  [Needs citation.]

Carnegie, Andrew.  He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that dare not is a slave.  [Needs citation.]

Carnegie, Andrew.   Here is the prime condition of success: Concentrate your energy, thought and capital exclusively upon the business in which you are engaged. Having begun on one line, resolve to fight it out on that line, to lead in it, adopt every improvement, have the best machinery, and know the most about it. [Quoted at http://www.icelebz.com/quotes/andrew_carnegie/].

Carnegie, Andrew.   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.’  [Speech, Curry Commercial College, Pittsburgh, June 23, 1885.Quotations from Encarta, http://encarta.msn.com/quote_561556882/investment_concentrate_your_energy_thought_and_.html]

Carr, E. H. It is significant that the nationalization of thought has proceded everywhere pari passu with the nationalization of industry.

Casement, Roger.  Where all your rights become only an accumulated wrong; where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to garner the fruits of their own labours — and even while they beg to see things inexorably withdrawn from them — then surely it is braver, a saner and truer thing, to be a rebel in act and deed against such circumstances as these than tamely to accept it as the natural lot of men.  [Last words at his trial, June 29, 1916.]

Cassiodorus, Magnus Aurelius.  Poverty is the mother of crime.  [Variae, Book IX.]

Catholic Bishops of America.  We express again our sympathy for labor and we appreciate the difficulties of maintaining family life with the mounting cost of living. In union with the Holy See, we have on many occasions condemned the evils of unrestrained capitalism. At the same time, in union with the Holy See, we hold that “our first and most fundamental principle, when we undertake to alleviate the condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property.”  [Statement, Crisis of Christianity, New York Times, November 18, 1941.]

Center for Economic and Social Justice.  One definition of justice is “giving to each what he or she is due.” The problem is knowing what is “due”.   Functionally, “justice” is a set of universal principles which guide people in judging what is right and what is wrong, no matter what culture and society they live in. Justice is one of the four “cardinal virtues” of classical moral philosophy, along with courage, temperance (self-control) and prudence (efficiency). (Faith, hope and charity are considered to be the three “religious” virtues.) Virtues or “good habits” help individuals to develop fully their human potentials, thus enabling them to serve their own self-interests as well as work in harmony with others for their common good.  The ultimate purpose of all the virtues is to elevate the dignity and sovereignty of the human person.  While often confused, justice is distinct from the virtue of charity.  Charity, derived from the Latin word caritas, or “divine love,” is the soul of justice. Justice supplies the material foundation for charity.  While justice deals with the substance and rules for guiding ordinary, everyday human interactions, charity deals with the spirit of human interactions and with those exceptional cases where strict application of the rules is not appropriate or sufficient. Charity offers expedients during times of hardship. Charity compels us to give to relieve the suffering of a person in need. The highest aim of charity is the same as the highest aim of justice: to elevate each person to where he does not need charity but can become charitable himself.  True charity involves giving without any expectation of return. But it is not a substitute for justice.  [“Toward Economic and Social Justice: Founding Principles of CESJ,” 1987.]

Cellar, Emanuel “We can’t have these great corporations crowding competition off the sidewalks,” he said. “It’s like an elephant saying, “Everyone for himself,” as he dances among the chickens.”  [Needs citation.]

Center for Economic and Social Justice.  Pursuing Liberty and Justice for All, through Private Property [for Each].  [CESJ brochure, 1987.]

Center for Economic and Social Justice.  Own or be owned.  [Slogan for Rally at the Federal Reserve, Dawn Kurland Brohawn, CESJ Director of Communications, 2005.]

Center for Economic and Social Justice.  Too few own the wealth of nations. Too many own nothing. [Banner on CESJ Website, Dawn Kurland Brohawn, Director of Communications,1995].

Cervantes, Miguel de.  Roque…lined his men up and had them produce all the clothing, jewels, money, and other objects that they had stolen since the last time they had divided the spoils. Having made a hasty appraisal and reduced to terms of money those items that could not be divided, he split the whole into shares with such equity and exactitude that in not a single instance did he go beyond or fall short of a strict distributive justice. They were all well satisfied with the payment received, indeed they were quite well pleased; and Roque then turned to Don Quixote.

“If I did not observe an absolute impartiality with these fellows,” he said, “there would be no living with them.”

“From what I have seen here,” remarked Sancho, “justice is so good a thing that even robbers find it necessary.”  [Don Quixote, Part II, Chapter IX.]

Cervantes, Miguel de.  There are two kinds of people in this world, my grandmother used to say: the Have’s and the Have-not’s, and she stuck to the Have’s. And today, Señor Don Quixote, people are more interested in having than in knowing. An ass covered with gold makes a better impression than a horse with a packsaddle.  [El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, Part Two, Chapter XX.]

Chamberlain, John. 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.

But now that foreign steel, and foreign cars, are moving into the United States in increased quantities at relatively low prices, the United States can no longer keep its business system fluid by inflation.

Thus a new way of finding fluidity will inevitably be imposed on management and labor alike. The profit-sharing, or “progress” sharing union contract is the only possible way of satisfying labor and the consumer without saddling industry with fixed costs that in depression periods can kill off marginal companies like flies.

Chesterfield, Earl of (Philip Dormer Stanhope).  Let us consider that arbitrary power has seldom or never been introduced into any country at once. It must be introduced by slow degrees, and as it were step by step, lest the people should see it approach. The barriers and fences of the people’s liberty must be plucked one by one, and some plausible pretenses must be found for removing or hoodwinking, one after another, those sentries who are posted by the constitution of a free country for warning the people of their danger. When these preparatory steps are once made, the people may then indeed, with regret, see slavery and arbitrary power making long strides over their land; but it will be too late to think of preventing or avoiding the impending ruin.  [Miscellaneous Works, Vol. IV, 1779.]

Chesterton, G. K.  All the controversialists who have become conscious of the real issue are already saying of our ideal exactly what used to be said of the Socialists’ ideal. They are saying that private property is too ideal not to be impossible. They are saying that private enterprise is too good to be true. They are saying that the idea of ordinary men owning ordinary possessions is against the laws of political economy and requires an alteration in human nature. They are saying that all practical business men know that the thing would never work, exactly as the same obliging people always prepared to know that State management would never work. For they hold the simple and touching faith that no management except their own could ever work. They call this the law of nature; and they call anybody who ventures to doubt it a weakling. “On a Sense of Proportion,”  [The Outline of Sanity, G. K. Chesterton: Collected Works, Volume V. San Francisco, California: Ignatius Press, 1987, p. 76.]

Chesterton, Gilbert Keith.  Capitalism is really a very unpleasant word. It is also a very unpleasant thing. Yet the thing I have in mind, when I say so, is quite definite and definable; only the name is a very unworkable word for it. But obviously we must have some word for it. When I say “Capitalism,” I commonly mean something that may be stated thus: “That economic condition in which there is a class of capitalists roughly recognizable and relatively small, in whose possession so much of the capital is concentrated as to necessitate a very large majority of the citizens serving those capitalists for a wage.” This particular state of things can and does exist, and we must have some word for it, and some way of discussing it. But this is undoubtedly a very bad word, because it is used by other people to mean quite other things. Some people seem to mean merely private property. Others suppose that capitalism must mean anything involving the use of capital. But if that use is too literal, it is also too loose and even too large. If the use of capital is capitalism, then everything is capitalism.  [“The Beginning of the Quarrel,” The Outline of Sanity. Collected Works, Volume V, San Francisco, California: Ignatius Press, 1987, p. 42.]

Chesterton, Gilbert Keith.  For the mass of men the idea of artistic creation can only be expressed by an idea unpopular in present discussions — the idea of property…. Property is merely the art of the democracy. . . .One would think, to hear people talk, that the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers were on the side of property. But obviously they are the enemies of property; because they are enemies of their own limitations. They do not want their own land; but other people’s…. It is the negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland should have all the farms in one estate; just as it would be the negation of marriage if he had all our wives in one harem.  [“The Enemies of Property” What’s Wrong With the World. G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works, Volume IV. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987, p. 65-6.]

Chesterton, Gilbert Keith.  [I]f the common man in the past had a grave respect for property, it may conceivably have been because he sometimes had some of his own.  [“The Need for Narrowness” What’s Wrong With the World. G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works, Volume IV. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987, p. 180.]

Churchill, Winston.  Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.  [The Gathering Storm, Bk.I, Ch.19, Houghton Mifflin, 1948, p.348.]

Cicero, Marcus Tullius.  Freedom is participation in power.  [Letters to Atticus.]

Cicero, Marcus Tullius.  A s laws multiply, injustice increases. (Summum ius summa iniuria.)  [De Officiis, I, 33]

Cicero, Marcus Tullius.  I know that it is likely that as worship of the gods declines, faith between men and all human society will disappear, as well as that most excellent of all virtues, which is justice. (Haud scio an pietate adversus deos sublata fides etiam et societas generi humani et una excellentissima virtus iustitia tollatur.)   [De Natura Deorum, I, 4.]

Clarke, Arthur C.  (on Paradigm shifts):

1. It’s crazy!

2. It may be possible — so what?

3. I said it was a good idea all along.

4. I thought of it first.

The Aharonov-Bohm effect, predicted in 1959, required nearly 30 years after its 1960

demonstration by Chambers until it was begrudgingly accepted. Mayer, who discovered the modern thermodynamic notion of conservation of energy related to work, was hounded and chastised so severely that he suffered a breakdown. Years later, he was lionized for the same effort Wegener, a German meteorologist, was made a laughing stock and his name became a pseudonym for “utter fool,” because he advanced the concept of continental drift in 1912. In the 1960s the evidence for continental drift became overwhelming, and today it is widely taught and part of the standard science curriculum. Gauss, the great mathematician, worked out nonlinear geometry but kept it firmly hidden for 30 years, because he knew that if he published it, his peers would destroy him. In the 1930s Goddard was ridiculed and called “moon-mad Goddard” because he predicted his rocketry would carry men to the moon. Years later when the Nazi fired V-1 and V-2 rockets against London, those rockets used the gyroscopic stabilization and many other features discovered and pioneered by Goddard. And as everyone knows, rocketry did indeed carry men to the moon. Science has a long and unsavory history of severely punishing innovation and new thinking. In the modern world such scientific suppression of innovation is uncalled-for, but it is still very much the rule rather than the exception.  [In “Space Drive: A Fantasy That Could Become Reality,” Nov./Dec. 1994, p. 38.]

Clements, Sterling W.  [Louis Kelso’s] Second Income Plan is a method for heightening at one time, both the industrial power of the people to produce wealth, and their legitimate power to consume it…. Capital-owning workers can engage in the production of wealth through both their labor and their capital ownership.  [Saturday Review, April 6, 1968.]

Cleveland, Grover.  At times like the present, when the evils of unsound finance threaten us, the speculator may anticipate a harvest gathered from the misfortune of others, the capitalist may protect himself by hoarding or may even find profit in the fluctuations of values; but the wage earner — the first to be injured by a depreciated currency and the last to receive the benefit of its correction — is practically defenseless.  [Annual message to Congress,1888.]

Cleveland, Grover.  The broad rich acres of our agricultural plains have been long preserved by nature to become her untrammeled gift to a people civilized and free, upon which should rest in well-distributed ownership the numerous homes of enlightened, equal and fraternal citizens.…Nor should our vast tracts of land be yielded up to the monopoly of corporations or grasping individuals, as appears to be much the tendency under the existing statute. I cannot help but think it perilous to suffer these lands or the sources of their irrigation to fall into the hands of monopolies, which by such means may exercise lordship over the areas dependent on their treatment for productiveness. [Message to Congress, December 3, 1888.]

Cleveland, Grover.  The wage earner relies upon the ventures of confident and contented capital. This failing him, his condition is without alleviation, for he can neither prey on the misfortune of others nor hoard his labor.  [Message, August 8, 1893.]

Cobbett, William.  Freedom is not an empty sound; it is not an abstract idea; it is not a thing that nobody can feel. It means, — and it means nothing else, — the full and quiet enjoyment of your own property. If you have not this, if this be not well secured to you, you may call yourself what you will, but you are a slave.  [A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, 1827, §456.]

Cobbett, William.  To be poor and independent is very nearly an impossibility. [Advice to Young Men.]

Cobbett, William.  You may twist the word freedom as long as you please, but at last it comes to quiet enjoyment of your own property, or it comes to nothing. Why do men want any of those things that are called political rights and privileges? Why do they, for instance, want to vote at elections for members of parliament? Oh! Because they shall then have an influence over the conduct of those members. And of what use is that? Oh! Then they will prevent the members from doing wrong. What wrong? Why, imposing taxes that ought not to be paid. That is all; that is the use, and the only use, of any right or privilege that men in general can have.  [A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, 1827, §456.]

Colicchio, Tom.  With conglomerates selling companies to liquidators, who close down plants and move to non-union areas, it’s about time progressive union leaders step in to stop such job-losing tactics.… ESOP should become a part of future bargaining packages!  [President Local 1729, U.S. Steel Workers Union, June 7, 1975.]

Collier, Abram T. Our objective should be the creation of a nation of capital owners, a nation of men who own capital and thereby receive, in addition to the income they receive by virtue of their labor, a second income by virtue of the capital they own. With such capital, and the income it provides, men could truly become politically free and economically independent. “The Relevance of Capital,” May 1968.

Collier, Abram T. (President, New England Mutual Life Insurance Company). The large majority of people have been encouraged to spend rather than save, to live up to their incomes, and to depend on government subsidies when their labor cannot be sold. Such a philosophy has also led our elected officials, who have noted that most voters own little capital, to be little concerned about inflation and the loss of fiscal balance and monetary stability…. One of the first things we can do is to define clearly the goals we want to reach with respect to the ownership of wealth. Do we want most of our capital owned by the state? Do we want most of our capital to be owned by a few individuals? Do we want most of our capital to be owned by many individuals?… Our objective should be the creation of a nation of capital owners, a nation of men who own capital and thereby receive in addition to the income they receive by virtue of their labor, a second income by virtue of the capital they own. With such capital, and the income it provides, men could truly become politically free and economically independent. [May 1968. Needs citation.]

Compton, Karl Taylor.  In recent times, modern science has developed to give mankind, for the first time in the history of the human race, a way of securing a more abundant life which does not simply consist in taking away from someone else.  [Address, The Social Implications of Scientific Discovery, American Philosophical Society, 1938.]

Compton, Karl Taylor.  Science really creates wealth and opportunity which did not exist before. Whereas the old order was based on competition, the new order of science makes possible, for the first time, a cooperative creative effort in which every one is the gainer and no one the loser…The advent of modern science is the most important social even in history.  [Address, The Social Implications of Scientific Discovery, American Philosophical Society, 1938.]

Confucius.  In a country well governed poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed wealth is something to be ashamed of.  [Analects, Book 14.]

Confucius.  When wealth is centralized the people are dispersed. When wealth is distributed the people are brought together.  [Analects, Book 14.]

Coolidge, Calvin.  Ultimately property rights and personal rights are the same thing.  [The Laurel Instant Quotation Dictionary.]

Crane, Dr. Robert D. (Professor, Faculty of Islamic Studies, Qatar Foundation).  If adapted to the unique requirements of various regions and peoples of the world, such economic pluralism could have a greater global impact over the next fifty years than the collectivist economics of Marxism and neo-Marxism have had during the half century just past.  [“New Directions for American Foreign Policy,”,Orbis, Summer 1969, Published by Foreign Policy Research Institute, University of Pennsylvania.]

Crane, Dr. Robert D.  The real causes of terrorism are not poverty and oppression per se, but rather the bankruptcy of materialist ideologies, like Neo-Conservatism, which promise much but deliver little.  The central doctrine of Neo-Conservatism is “democratic capitalism.”  This is the ultimate oxymoron, because in practice the political pluralism that should underlie democracy cannot exist in a climate of economic plutocracy.  Political monopoly and economic monopoly are two sides of the same coin, two heads of the same monster.  Despite all the claims to the contrary, the essential ideology of Neo-Conservatism is to preserve the status quo, with all of its injustices.  Its public relations experts call for “freedom and democracy” without a framework of higher values.  They fail to comprehend the need for a paradigm of justice and therefore are blind to what concerns most of the people in the world.  This failure is the taproot of terrorism. [“The Taproot of Terrorism,” June 2, 2005.]

Cross, Theodore L. The wealth-making techniques of credit leverage are one of the most efficient and direct methods of producing affluence in a poor society. The program is brilliantly creative and specific. [Black Capitalism: Strategy for Business in the Ghetto.]

Cross, Theodore L.  The works of Louis O. Kelso and Patricia Hetter are an essential starting point for reading on black enterprise. The authors develop the wealth-making techniques of credit leverage as one of the most efficient and direct methods of producing affluence in a poor society. The program is brilliantly creative and specific. [Black Capitalism: Strategy for Business in the Ghetto.]

cummings, e. e.  Private property began the instant somebody had a mind of his own.  [The Laurel Instant Quotation Dictionary.]

Curtiss, W. M.  The basic question…is not whether there should be economic planning, but rather who should do it. Economic planning there will be. It will be done either by millions of individuals who are directly concerned, each making his own independent decisions, or it will be done by a central planning committee, given power to ignore the judgment of these individuals.  [Quoted in Freedom Daily, March 1990.]

[Davis, Garry.]  FIND SOME QUOTES.

De Gaulle, Charles.  I’m not at all embarrassed to be a revolutionary.  [“Parallel Sights: Revolution,” Hastings Law News, February 18, 1975.]

Dennis, C. L. (President, Brotherhood of Railway, Airline and Steamship Clerks, AFL-CIO).  Employee ownership has much to offer in strengthening our railroad system in the areas of labor-management relations, and of giving the employees the opportunity to participate in a more meaningful way in the fruits of the [free enterprise] system.  [Letter to the Wall Street Journal, December 28, 1970.]

Derrick, Christopher.  We like to distinguish those regimes which are totalitarian from those which are not. But that is a distinction of degree, not of kind. All government seeks to be absolute and will become absolute in fact unless restrained by effective checks and balances: nominally the servant of the sovereign people, it naturally tends to become the manager and manipulator, even their owner. So, while population control is partly a cause of the rich against the poor, it’s also a cause of government against the citizen. Where poverty continues, witness is borne to the very limited competence of government, to the unwelcome fact that it does not really have a God-like power to solve all problems and provide all good things; and in any case, what farmer wants to have more cattle than he can manage comfortably?  [Too Many People? pp. 59-60.]

Deuteronomy 16:20.  Justice, justice, thou shalt pursue.

Dewey, John.  Historically the great movements for human liberation have always been movements to change institutions and not to preserve them intact. It follows from what has been said that there have been movements to bring about a changed distribution of power to do — and power to think and to express thought is a power to do— so that there would be a more balanced, a more equal, even, and equitable system of human liberties.  [Freedom and Culture, Putnam, 1939.]

Dewey, John The demand for liberty is a demand for power, either for possession of powers of action not already possessed or for retention and expansion of powers already possessed.  [Freedom and Culture, Putnam, 1939.]

Dickens, Charles.  “My other piece of advice, Copperfield,” said Mr. Micawber, “you know. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the God of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and—in short, you are for ever floored. As I am!”  [David Copperfield, New York: New American Library, 1962, p. 182.]

Diodorus Siculus.  (1st century BC Greek historian).  It is absurd to entrust the defense of a country to people who own nothing in it.

Disraeli, Benjamin.  Justice is truth in action.  [The Eternal Light, ed. Jewish Publication Society of America. Harper and Row, 1966.]

Douglass, Frederick.  Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.  [Speech on the twenty-fourth anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Columbia, Washington, D.C., April 1886.]

Douglass, Frederick.  Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work.  [Autobiography.]

Douglass, Frederick.  Power and those in control concede nothing . . . without a demand.  They never have and never will.…  Each and every one of us must keep demanding, must keep fighting, must keep thundering, must keep plowing, must keep on keeping things struggling, must speak out and speak up until justice is served because where there is no justice there is no peace.

Douglas, William O. The right to work, I had assumed, was the most precious liberty that man possesses. Man has indeed as much right to work as he has to live, to be free, to own property.  [Dissent, U.S. Supreme Court, Barsky v. Regents, April 26, 1954.]

Downie, Charles. This is as revolutionary a book as Karl Marx’s Das Capital, only this has a message of hope. The Kelsonian theory would create a world-wide revolution, but it is neither impossible nor necessary to have bloody encounters in order to carry it out.  [Review of Louis Kelso and Patricia Hetter’s Two-Factor Theory in the San Francisco Chronicle, September 8, 1968.]

Drucker, Peter.  There is the general belief that the corporation income tax is a tax on the “rich” and on the “fat cats.” But with pension funds owning 30% of American large business—and soon to own 50%—the corporation income tax, in effect, eases the load on those in top income brackets and penalizes the beneficiaries of pension funds.  [The Wall Street Journal, September 16, 1975.]

Durant, Will.  When liberty destroys order, the hunger for order will destroy liberty.

Durant, Will and Ariel.  The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history. The rate of concentration varies (other factors being equal) with the economic freedom permitted by morals and laws. Despotism may for a time retard the concentration; democracy, allowing the most freedom, accelerates it. The relative equality of Americans before 1776 has been overwhelmed by a thousand forms of physical, mental and economic differentiation, so that the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest is now greater than at any time since Imperial plutocratic Rome. In progressive societies the concentration may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.  [The Lessons of History, Simon and Shuster, 1968, p. 55.]

Edison, Thomas.  In creating technology for ourselves we created it for the world.

Edwardsen, Charles (Etok) (Executive Director, Alaskan Slope Natives Association).  We have become firmly convinced that the Second Income Plan is the answer that we have been searching for to achieve a just and equitable settlement of the Alaskan Native land claims.

Einstein, Albert.  Concern for man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors, concern for the great unsolved problems of the organization of labor and the distribution of goods — in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind.  [Address to California Institute of Technology, 1931.]

Eisenhower, President Dwight D. A living democracy needs to have diversities brought together in a common purpose. A common purpose that is so fair and so reasonable and so appealing that all can rally to it. [Letter to William Phillips on Eisenhower’s philosophy of leadership.]

Emerson, Ralph Waldo.  Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.

Epictetus.   Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of things.

Epicurus.  Justice is never anything in itself, but in the dealings of men with one another in any place whatever and at any time. It is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.  [Principle Doctrines, xxxiii.]

Epstein, Richard A. (Professor of Law, University of Chicago) The protection of private property does more than promote market efficiency; it enhances the level of human freedom in the most intimate and personal parts of our lives.  [“Rule of Law,” The Wall Street Journal July 27, 1994, p. A11.]

Executive Committee of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference.  We are in agreement with the desire of workers to increase their income… [H]owever, we insist that most of this increased income should be derived from ownership of capital. Any other policy leads to the disorderly taking from the owners of capital the income which rightfully belongs to them. Our government increased this disorder by creating many economically unproductive jobs. Of course most of the funds for such jobs are derived from property and corporation profit taxes which further discourages ownership of capital by the majority of our people….  If property can confer dignity, material comfort, and security upon the few, it can do the same for the many….  We note the repeated affirmations by Popes Leo XIII, Pius XI, John XXIII, and Paul VI] of the natural right of all men to private property and their growing insistence upon the need for making ownership and its benefits serve the needs of all of God’s people….  We suggest that the perennial emphasis of the Church on the right of individuals to own [productive] property deserves reaffirmation at this time and that we should consider bold new steps to enable the vast majority of God’s people to become owners of property which will constitute for them a source of a second income. We maintain that this will help reduce poverty and to restore human rights and dignity to millions.  [Des Moines, Iowa, June 19, 1968.]

Fairless, Benjamin. We know that the only alternative to private competition is government monopoly of enterprise. We know that when government monopolizes production, distribution, and employment, it is no longer the servant of men — it is their master. And, therefore, we know that economic liberty and political liberty are inseparable parts of the same ball of wax — that we must keep them both, or we shall lose them both.

Faulkner, William.  We will have to choose not between color nor race nor religion nor between East and West either, but simply between being slaves and being free. And we will have to choose completely and for good; the time is already past now when we can choose a little of each, a little of both. We can choose a state of slavedom, and if we are powerful enough to be among the top two or three or ten, we can have a certain amount of license — until someone more powerful rises and has us machine-gunned against a cellar wall.  [Harper’s Magazine, June, 1956.]

Federal Reserve Act of 1913.   Upon the indorsement of any of its member banks, which shall be deemed a waiver of demand, notice and protest by such bank as to its own indorsement exclusively, any Federal reserve bank may discount notes, drafts, and bills of exchange arising out of actual commercial transactions; that is, notes, drafts, and bills of exchange issued or drawn for agricultural, industrial, or commercial purposes, or the proceeds of which have been used, or are to be used, for such purposes, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System to have the right to determine or define the character of the paper thus eligible for discount, within the meaning of this Act….   [Section 13, paragraph 2 of original Act.]

Ferre, Luis (former governor of Puerto Rico).  [My personal philosophy is] revolutionary in ideas, liberal in objectves, and conservative in methods.  [Speech before the National Press Club, 1969.]

Ferree S.M. Ph.D., William (social philosopher)[A] serious and constant preoccupation with social organization, in all its forms, and at all its levels, is the duty, according to his capacity, of every man living in society. This is a big order, especially when it is further realized that such a duty (allowing, of course, for the inescapable and all too evident limitations of discursive reason) binds him in every exterior action of his life.  [Introduction to Social Justice, Chapter II.]

Ferree S.M. Ph.D., William  [E]very single person must face the direct and strict obligation of reorganizing his life and the life around him, so that the individual perfection both of himself and of his immediate neighbors will become possible.  [Ibid.,  p. 52.]

Ferree S.M. Ph.D., William.  [W]ithout right organization, without good social groups, without just institutions, there is no such thing as Social Justice, and in such a state the perfection of human life becomes impossible.  [Introduction to Social Justice, Chapter II.]

Ferree S.M. Ph.D., William.  For Pope Pius XI, the theory of justice is based squarely on the dignity of the human personality.  His position is that charity regulates our actions toward the human personality itself, that Image of God which is the object of love because it mirrors forth the Divine Perfections, and in the supernatural order shares those perfections.  The human personality, however, because it is a created personality, needs certain “props” for the realization of its dignity.  These “props” or supports of human dignity, which includes such things as property, relatives and friends, freedom and responsibility, are all objects of justice.  To attack a human person in his personality itself, as by hatred, is a failure against charity; but to attack him be undermining the supports of his human dignity, as by robbery, is a failure against justice.

The same thing is true in the field of social morality.  The human community, as such, shows forth the perfections of God in ways that are not open to individuals.  This fact is very clearly stated in paragraph 30 of the Encyclical Divini Redemptoris:

“In a further sense it is society which affords the opportunity for the development of all the individuals and social gifts bestowed on human nature.  These natural gifts have a value surpassing the immediate interests of the moment, for in society the reflect a Divine Perfection, which would not be true were man to live alone.”

Society itself, therefore, as thus revealing further the perfection of God in His creatures, is worthy of love: of a love directed not only towards the individuals who compose the society, but also toward their union with each other.  This love is social charity.

Moreover, as society thus makes available to man the further perfection of his potentialities of mirroring the Divine Perfection, it is also a support for these perfections, and hence is an object of the virtue of justice.  This justice, Social Justice, which is directed at the Common Good itself, requires that the society be so organized as to be in fact a vehicle for human perfection.   [“The Dignity of the Human Personality: Basis of a Theory of Justice,” Chapter III of Introduction to Social Justice, Paulist Press, 1948, pp. 24-25.]

Ferree S.M. Ph.D., William.  Every higher institution depends on all those below it for its effectiveness, and every lower institution depends on those above it for its own proper place in the Common Good. It is precisely this whole vast network of institutions which is the Common Good, on which everyone of us depends for the realization of our personal perfection, of our personal good. It is wrong to conceive of the Common Good as a sort of general bank account into which one “deposits” when, for instance he pays his taxes to the state; and “withdraws” when he is appointed public coordinator of something or other at hundred and fifty dollars a week, or when the state builds a road past his farm and thus raises its value. Nor must we think of the Common Good as something which we can “share with another” like a candy bar or an automobile ride. Rather it is something which each of us possesses in its entirety, like light, or life itself. When the Common Good is badly organized, when society is socially unjust, then it is each individual’s own share of personal perfection which is limited, or which is withheld from him entirely.   [Introduction to Social Justice, New York: Paulist Press, 1948, p. 21.]

Ferree S.M. Ph.D., William.   [T]he power to make all human society conform to the norms of Social Justice is vested in institutions, in organizations of men, not in men as isolated individuals. Social Justice is something social.  [“Two Levels and Many Divisions, Chapter II, Introduction to Social Justice.]

Ferree S.M. Ph.D., WilliamTo deepen our understanding of Social Justice we must get a clearer concept of its object: the “Common Good” or “general welfare” as it is called. Let us start with two great facts: (1) An isolated individualist cannot practice Social Justice at all, he must associate himself with groups of various kinds and work along with them before he can practice it; and (2) Every  human action whatever has some bearing on the Common Good, and hence must conform to Social Justice or be sinful.  [“The Object of Social Justice: The Common Good,” Chapter IV, Introduction to Social Justice.]

Ferree S.M. Ph.D., William.  [J]ust as an individual is called “good” without qualification, not because of a single good act or good quality, even though it be of heroic proportions, but because of his good habits, that is, his moral virtues; so a society is not to be called “good” without qualification for the good individuals in it or for some great collective act of generosity or valor, but only for its good institutions, that is its Social Justice.

And just as vice is as much a habit as virtue; so bad institutions are as much organized as good ones. The only difference is in the kind of organization and that is determined by its end: the good to secure the development and perfection of the full human life, and the bad to grasp some sort of immediate advantage regardless of the consequences.  [“Virtue is the Habit of Doing Good,” Chapter V, Introduction to Social Justice.]

Ferree S.M. Ph.D., William.  Every individual, regardless of his age or occupation or state of life, is directly responsible for the Common Good, because the Common Good is built up in a hierarchical order. That is, every great human institution consists of subordinate institutions, which themselves consist of subordinate institutions, on down to the individuals who compose the lowest and most fleeting of human institutions. Since every one of these institutions is directly responsible for the general welfare of the one above it, it follows that every individual is directly responsible for the lower institutions which immediately surround his life, and indirectly (that is, through these and other intermediate institutions) responsible for the general welfare of his whole country and the whole world.  [“Each is Directly Responsible,” Chapter VI, Introduction to Social Justice.]

Ferree S.M. Ph.D., William.  Social charity and social justice, the whole complex of the social virtues, are the tools with which we can handle this bigger world and we need these tools to handle this world as much as we need our individual charity and individual justice to handle our personal relations.  If we don’t have that social charity and social justice, this bigger new world is going to escape from us, it’s going to destroy itself and us because it can’t be controlled.  That’s another advance.  For the first time human nature can destroy itself utterly and completely.  That couldn’t be done before; it can be done now.   [Introduction to Social Justice.]

Ferree S.M. Ph.D., William. [I]n Social Justice there is never any such thing as helplessness. No problem is ever too big or too complex, no field is ever too vast, for the methods of this Social Justice. Problems that were agonizing in the past and were simply dodged, even by serious and virtuous people, can now be solved with ease by any school child.  [“Nothing is Impossible,” Chapter VII, Introduction to Social Justice.]

Ferree S.M. Ph.D., WilliamThe act of Social Justice is the act of organizing.  The power that we have now to change any institution of life was always there but we did not know how to use it.  Now we know.  [Chapter VI, Introduction to Social Justice.]

Finley, Dr. Knox H (Director of the Institute of Neurological Sciences, Pacific Medical Center, San Francisco). Two-Factor Theory can make an important mental health contribution to unleash the individuality of the human brain….individual creative freedom which would become available to the great majority of man through the Two-Factor Economic System is limitless.

First Continental Congress.  [T]hat the inhabitants of the English colonies in North America, by the immutable laws of nature, the principles of the English constitution, and the several charters or compacts, have the following RIGHTS: Resolved… That they are entitled to life, liberty and property: and they have never ceded to any foreign power whatever, a right to dispose of either without their consent.  [Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress, October 14, 1774.]

Forbes.  One of the great things that ESOPs have going for them is that they are such a natural from a political viewpoint: who in populist Washington, whether liberal or conservative, would knock the idea of spreading ownership?  [May 1, 1975.]

Ford, Henry.  Gold is the most useless thing in the world. I am not interested in money but in the things of which money is merely a symbol.

Foucault, Michel.  Search for what is good and strong and beautiful in your society and elaborate from there. Push outward. Always create from what you already have. Then you will know what to do.

Fracchia, Charles A.  No man is a prophet in his own country and Louis Kelso is no exception…. Kelso stands in a long and honorable tradition of nonaccepted men of ideas: In his case, however, it is not so much that conservative vested interests deny the validity of his ideas or of his system, but that apathy and ignorance have not examined them.  [Daily Commercial News, San Francisco, June 26, 1970.]

Francis, Mrs. Ennis (Director of Economic Development, Central Harlem Council of Neighborhood Boards).  It is indeed gratifying to see the light of day after struggling in darkness so long. The Second Income Plan has so stimulated our community that we can hardly wait for its implementation.   [Letter to Norman G. Kurland, March 7, 1969.]

Francis (Pope).  Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality.  Such an economy kills.  How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality.  Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless.  As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.

Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded.  We have created a “disposable” culture which is now spreading.  It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new.  Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be part of the society in which we live. . . . The excluded are not the “exploited” but the outcasts, the “leftovers”.  [Evangelii Gaudium, (“The Joy of the Gospel”), Vatican Apostalic Exhortation, §53, Nov. 26, 2013.]

Francis (Pope).   Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.  This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile the excluded are still waiting.   [Evangelii Gaudium, op. cit., §54, Nov. 26, 2013.]

Francis (Pope).  One cause of this situation is found in our relationship with money, since we calmly accept its dominion over ourselves and our societies. The current financial crisis can make us overlook the fact that it originated in a profound human crisis: the denial of the primacy of the human person!  We have created new idols.  The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose.  The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to only one of his needs: consumption.   [Evangelii Gaudium, op. cit., §55, Nov. 26, 2013.]

Francis (Pope).  While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few.  This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation.  Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control.  A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules….  The thirst for power and possessions knows no limit.  In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of the deified market, which become the only rule.   [Evangelii Gaudium, op. cit., §56, Nov. 26, 2013.]

Francis (Pope).  Today in many places we hear a call for greater security. But until exclusion and inequality in society and between peoples is reversed, it will be impossible to eliminate violence. The poor and the poorer peoples are accused of violence, yet without equal opportunities the different forms of aggression and conflict will find a fertile terrain for growth and eventually explode. When a society – whether local, national or global – is willing to leave a part of itself on the fringes, no political programmes or resources spent on law enforcement or surveillance systems can indefinitely guarantee tranquility. This is not the case simply because inequality provokes a violent reaction from those excluded from the system, but because the socioeconomic system is unjust at its root. Just as goodness tends to spread, the toleration of evil, which is injustice, tends to expand its baneful influence and quietly to undermine any political and social system, no matter how solid it may appear. If every action has its consequences, an evil embedded in the structures of a society has a constant potential for disintegration and death. It is evil crystallized in unjust social structures, which cannot be the basis of hope for a better future. We are far from the so-called “end of history”, since the conditions for a sustainable and peaceful development have not yet been adequately articulated and realized.   [Evangelii Gaudium, op. cit., §59, Nov. 26, 2013.]

Franklin, Benjamin.  God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: “This is my country.” [Letter to David Hartley, December 4, 1789.]

Franklin, Benjamin.  It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.

Franklin, Benjamin.  Poverty often deprives a man of all spirit and virtue; it is hard for an empty bag to stand upright.

Franklin, Benjamin.  Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. Assembly: Reply to the Governor, November 11, 1755.  [This quotation, slightly altered, is inscribed on a plaque in the stairwell of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”]

Franklin, Benjamin.  The ancients tell us what is best, but we must learn from the moderns what is fittest.

Franklin, Benjamin.  The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned; but still ’tis nonsense.

Franklin, Benjamin.  Well done is better than well said.

Franklin, Benjamin.  Outside Independence Hall when the Constitutional Convention of 1787 ended,

Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”  With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Friedman, Milton.  A crackpot theory. Instead of saying labor’s exploited, as Marx did, Kelso says capital’s exploited. It’s worse than Marx. It’s Marx stood on its [sic] head.  [“The Man Who Would Make Everybody Richer,” Time, June 29, 1970, pp. 72-3.]

Fuller, Buckminster.   We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims. . . .  [Our challenge is to] make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.  [Utopia or Oblivion.]

Fuller, Buckminster.  You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete[Critical Path.]

Fuller, Buckminster.  Don’t attempt to reform man.  An adequately organized environment will permit humanity’s original, innate capabilities to become successful. 

Fuller, Buckminster.  A problem adequately stated is a problem well on its way to being solved.

Fuller, Buckminster.  There is no Energy Shortage. There is no Energy Crisis. There is a Crisis of Ignorance.

Fuller, Buckminster.  If man chooses oblivion, he can go right on leaving his fate to his political leaders. If he chooses Utopia, he must initiate an enormous education program — immediately, if not sooner.  [Utopia or Oblivion.]

Fuller, Buckminster.  [H]ere is an educational bombshell:  Take from all of today’s industrial nations all their industrial machinery and all their energy-distributing networks, and leave them all their ideologies, all their political leaders, and all their political organizations, and I can tell you that within six months, two billion people will die of starvation, having gone through great pain and deprivation along the way.  [Utopia or Oblivion.]

However, if we leave the industrial machinery and their energy-distribution networks and leave them also all the people who have routine jobs operating the industrial machinery and distributing its products, and we take away from all the industrial countries all their ideologies and all the politicians and political machine workers, people would keep right on eating.  Possibly getting on a little better than before.  [Utopia or Oblivion.]

Fuller, Buckminster.  Havenotness is caused by society’s failure to design and produce the right tools and goods. Money alone is not the panacea.

Fuller, Buckminster.  There is only one revolution tolerable to all men, all societies, all political systems: Revolution by design and invention.

Fuller, Buckminster.  Now there is one outstanding important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.

Fuller, Buckminster.  Ninety-nine percent of humanity does not know that we have the option to “make it” economically on this planet and in the Universe. We do.

Fuller, Buckminster.  For man to go from less than 1% [haves] to 40%, living at high standard — despite decreasing resources — cannot be explained by anything other than by doing more than less.  [Utopia or Oblivion.]

Fuller, Buckminster.  Consisting mostly of recirculating scrapped metals, 80% of all the metals that have ever been mined are still at work.  [Utopia or Oblivion.]

Fuller, Buckminster.  We are operating at an overall mechanical efficiency of only four percent…. Therefore, we find that if we increase the overall mechanical efficiency to only twelve percent we can take care of everybody.  That three-fold increase in the overall efficiency can only be accomplished by redesign.  [Utopia or Oblivion.]

Fuller, Buckminster.  U.S. labor leaders will realize that automation can multiply man’s wealth far more rapidly than it is multiplying at present and that automation will leave all men free to search and research….  Realizing the direct competition with foreign industry on a straight labor basis will mean swiftly decreasing wages per hour and longer hours and decreasing buying power of the public…. American labor will realize that its function is not to increase jobs, but to multiply the wealth and to expand the numbers benefited by the wealth at the swiftest possible rate.  [Utopia or Oblivion.]

Fuller, Buckminster.  We will always have war until there is enough of every essential to support all lives everywhere around earth.  [Utopia or Oblivion.]

Fuller, Buckminster.  People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.” 

Fuller, Buckminster. When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” 

Fuller, Buckminster.   Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary — the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, call me Trim Tab. [Trim tabs as a metaphor for leadership and personal empowerment.]  [Playboy, February 1972.]

Fuller, Edmund.  When we invoke the soul we move from the realm of information to the more vital realm of wisdom, the attainment of which is the only true value of learning.  [The Wall Street Journal, May 25, 1975.]

Fuller, Edmund.  With all respect to Mr. Jefferson, I would put the pursuit of wisdom ahead of the pursuit of happiness.  [The Wall Street Journal, May 25, 1975.]

Galbraith, John Kenneth.  Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days do for a lifetime.

Gandhi.  Before a hungry man God may not appear except in the form of bread.

Garfield, James A.  Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.  [From The Great Quotations, George Seldes, ed.]

Garrison, William Lloyd.  Enslave the liberty of but one human being and the liberties of the world are put in peril.

Garrison, William Lloyd.  There is no safety where there is no strength; no strength without Union; no Union without justice; no justice where faith and truth are wanting. The right to be free is a truth planted in the hearts of men.  [William Lloyd Garrison: The Story of His Life, p. 200.]

Garrison, William Lloyd.  There must be no compromise with slavery — none whatever. Nothing is gained, everything is lost, by subordinating principle to expedience.  [The Liberator.]

George, Henry.  Although there may be in a community individuals who from want of capital cannot apply their labor as efficiently as they would, yet so long as there is a sufficiency of capital in the community at large, the real limitation is not the want of capital, but the want of its proper distribution. If bad government rob the laborer of his capital, if unjust laws take from the producer the wealth with which he would assist production, and hand it over to those who are mere pensioners upon industry, the real limitation to the effectiveness of labor is in misgovernment, and not in want of capital. And so of ignorance, or custom, or other conditions which prevent the use of capital. It is they, not the want of capital, that really constitute the limitation.  [Progress and Poverty, New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1979, p. 84.]

George, Henry.  If you would have the slave show the virtues of the freeman, you must first make him free.  [Progress and Poverty, p. 310.]

George, Henry The word capital, as philologists trace it, comes down to us from a time when wealth was estimated in cattle, and a man’s income depended upon the number of head he could keep for their increase.  [Progress and Poverty, New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1979, p. 37-38.]

Glass, Carter.  A liberal is a man who is willing to spend somebody else’s money.

Greider, William.  Louis Kelso’s “money-and-credit” system would use the central bank to distribute the ownership of new capital democratically and, thus, restore the economic autonomy that so many had lost. If everyone owned capital, each would be more free — less dependent on both concentrated wealth and the liberal welfare state…. [T]he Federal Reserve’s money-creation powers could be harnessed directly to the need for new capital, channeling low-interest credit to new enterprises, provided that the stock ownership of these companies was distributed broadly among workers and communities, indeed to all citizens.  Instead of only buying government securities when it created money, the Fed would buy the debt paper of employee-owned or community-owned trusts, which financed the new capital formation.  When the new ventures paid off the debts on their new machines and factories, the loan paper would be retired and ordinary citizens would hold title to the new capital stock.  Over a generation or longer, without confiscating or nationalizing anyone’s property, the ownership of wealth would become more broadly distributed…. Like the sub-treasury plan [of the populists of the nineteenth century], there was no technical reason why Kelso’s scheme (or at least a modest version, could not be made to work compatibly with with the Fed’s other obligations to control the expansion of money and credit.  But there were many political reasons.  He was offering a new version of the political choice that American politics had always refused to make.”  [Secrets of the Temple:  How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country, 1987, p.266.]

Greider, William.  “In the shadow of the old order, a small, spirited group of Americans campaigned audaciously to construct a new order  — the U.S. economy reorganized around Louis Kelso’s revolutionary principle of universal capital ownership. The revolution, these ambitious activists decided, ought to begin right in the nation’s capital — Washington, D.C. —  a city mired in financial insolvency, with accelerating social and economic deterioration, with extremes of wealth and poverty as stark as any found in America. Under congressional oversight, the District of Columbia could become the laboratory, they thought, the place where Kelso’s ideas were actually applied. If the concept worked for D.C., every city and region in America would want to emulate it….

The power of Louis Kelso’s vision… has attracted an odd assortment of converts-idealists from right and left and from across the usual racial and religious divides, people who believed Kelso’s thinking held the key for renewing American society. Some of them joined with [Norman] Kurland in his Center for Economic and Social Justice to promote a daring experiment: Congress should designate the District of Columbia a “super empowerment zone” that would launch new enterprises and industries (and privatize some governmental functions) through Kelso’s mechanism of citizen and worker ownership trusts. new economic development would be attracted to D.C., not by tax subsidies or relaxed laws, but because low-interest capital credit would be available to the community trusts-cheap credit provided through the Federal Reserve’s discount lending.  [One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism, Chapter 18, pp. 432-433.]

Grit.  Maybe the reason some folks lag behind in our free enterprise system is because they depend too much on the free part and not enough on their own enterprise.

Grosscup, Peter Stenger.  [T]he institution of private property…is undergoing, at this time, a strain never put on it before. Not because the corporation, in essence, is retrogressive or unrepublican, but because in fact, it is unrepublican, and for that reason retrogressive also…. The effect of the corporation, under the prevailing policy of the free, go-as-you-please method of organization and management, has been to drive the bulk of our people, other than farmers, out of property ownership; and, if allowed to go on as present, it will keep them out.… The paramount problem is not how to stop the growth of property, and the building up of wealth, but how to manage it so that every species of property, like a healthy growing tree will spread its roots deeply and widely in the soil of a popular proprietorship. The paramount problem…is how to make this new form of property ownership a workable agent toward repeopleizing the proprietorship of the country’s industries…. Open to the wage-earner of the country the road to proprietorship…not as a gratuity, but as their proper allotment out of the combined forces that have made the enterprise successful.  [“How to Save the Corporation,” MacClure’s Magazine, February, 1905.]

Guareschi, Giovanni.   “No, Don Camillo; you didn’t exactly steal it. Peppone had two cigars in his pocket. Peppone is a Communist. He believes in sharing things. By skillfully relieving him of one cigar, you only took your fair share.”  [“Night School,” The Little World of Don Camillo, New York: Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1950, p. 36.]

Hamilton, Alexander.  Civil liberty is only natural liberty, modified and secured by the sanctions of civil society.  [“The Farmer Refuted,” February 23, 1775.]

Hamilton, Alexander.  The power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.  [Federalist No. 79, “The Judiciary Department Continued,” McLean’s Edition, New York.]

Hamilton, Alexander.  The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records.  They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power. [“The Farmer Refuted,” February 23, 1775.]

Harper, F. A.  It seems that wherever the Welfare State is involved, the moral precept, “Thou shalt not steal,” becomes altered to say: “Thou shalt not steal, except for what thou deemest to be a worthy cause, where thou thinkest that thou canst use the loot for a better purpose than wouldst the victim of the theft.” [Quoted in Freedom Daily, March 1990.]

Hart, Gary.  Employee ownership and worker participation in management decisions are important trends we should support and encourage.  [Washington Post, March 25, 1982.]

Hayek, F.A.  It is also true that the less possible it becomes for a man to acquire a new fortune, the more must the existing fortunes appear as privileges for which there is no justification. Policy is then certain to aim at taking these fortunes out of private hands, either by the slow process of heavy taxation of inheritance or by the quicker one of outright confiscation. A system based on private property and control of the means of production presupposes that such property and control can be acquired by any successful man. If this is made impossible, even the men who otherwise would have been the most eminent capitalists of the new generation are bound to become the enemies of the established rich.  [The Constitution of Liberty, The University of Chicago Press, 1960, p. 321.]

To build a better world, we must have the courage to make a new start. We must clear away the obstacles with which human folly has recently encumbered our path and release the creative energy of individuals. We must create conditions favourable to progress rather than ‘planning progress’….The guiding principle in any attempt to create a world of free men must be this: a policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy. [“The Road to Serfdom in Cartoons,” originally published in Look Magazine, republished by General Motors, “Thought Starter” series (no. 118), 1945.]

Henderson, Hazel.  Only now are increasing numbers of political and social scientists beginning to realize that [Kelso’s] theories provide a private-property-based alternative to the imminent passage of a government-distributed “guaranteed income” or “negative income tax.” [Harvard Business Review, September-October 1969.]

Hewlett, William (Chairman Hewlett-Packard Corporation),  We felt that the employees would take a greater interest in work if they felt they were part of the company.   [Quoted in Working Together, by Simmons and Mares, 1983, p. 211.]

Hirsch, Richard G.  Greater is he who lends than he who gives, and greater still is he who lends, and with the loan, helps the poor man to help himself.  [From Shabbat 63a, “There Shall be no Poor,” Union of American Hebrew Congregations, Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism, New York, 1965, p. 21.]

Hoffman, Hallock.  It is possible to imagine a voluntary economy, an economy that would let people choose their level of work and spending without exploitation or domination….  I would be content with the Kelso-Adler proposal as a way to make the economy voluntary.  [“Is There Life After Birth,” The Center Magazine, Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, July 1968.]

Holiday, Billie.  Them that’s got shall get, Them that’s not shall lose. So the Bible says, And it still is news./ Mama may have, Papa may have, But God bless the child that’s got his own.  [“God Bless the Child,” Billie Holiday, Arthur Herzog, Jr.]

Hoover, Herbert Clark Liberalism is a force truly of the spirit proceeding from the deep realization that economic freedom cannot be sacrificed if political freedom is to be preserved.  [Address, New York City, October 31, 1932.]

Hoover, Herbert.  New discoveries in science…will continue to create a thousand new frontiers for those who would still adventure.

Hoover, Herbert.  The party should stand for a constantly wider diffusion of property. That is the greatest social and economic security that can come to free men. It makes free men. We want a nation of proprietors, not a state of collectivists. That is attained by creating a national wealth and income, not by destroying it. The income and estate taxes create an orderly movement to diffuse swollen fortunes more effectively than all the quacks.… [From “An American Platform,” Philadelphia, Pa., May 14, 1936.]

Hoover, Herbert.  We supported the cooperative movement among farmers. The movement was still young and stubbornly opposed to the commercial distributors. I believed it to be one of the most helpful undertakings, for according to my social theories any organization run by citizens for their own welfare is preferable to the same action by the government.  [Memoirs, II, p. 110]

Hoover, Herbert. Words without actions are the assassins of idealism.

Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus).  It is difficult to administer properly what belongs to all in common. (Dificile est proprie communia dicere.)  [De Ars Poetica, 9.]

Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus).  The source of justice has necessarily been the fear of injustice, just look through all time and history of the world. (Iura inventa metu iniusti fateare necesse est, tempora si fastosque velis evolvere mundi.)  [8 December 65—27, November 8 BC Satiræ, III.]

Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus).  This was my prayer: an adequate portion of land with a garden and a spring of water and a small wood to complete the picture. (Hoc erat in votis: modus agri non ita magnus, hortus ubi et tecto vicinus iugis aquæ fons et paulum silvæ super his foret.)  [Satiræ, vi, 1.]

Hugo, Victor.  There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come. (On résiste à l’invasion des armées; on ne résiste pas à l’invasion des idées.“)  [Histoire d’un Crime (The History of a Crime), 1852, translation published in 1877, Conclusion, Ch. X. Trans. T.H. Joyce and Arthur Locker. Also in Wikiquotes.]

Hume, David.  It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.

Humphrey, Hubert H.  [C]apital, and the question of who owns it and therefore reaps the benefit of its productiveness, is an extremely important issue that is complementary to the issue of full employment….I see these as twin pillars of our economy: Full employment of our labor resources and widespread ownership of our capital resources. Such twin pillars would go a long way in providing a firm underlying support for future economic growth that would be equitably shared.  [Letter to The Washington Post, July 20, 1976.]

Huxley, Aldous.  [I]t is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible. Or take the right to vote. In principle, it is a great privilege. In practice, as recent history has repeatedly shown, the right to vote, by itself, is no guarantee of liberty. Therefore, if you want to avoid dictatorship by referendum, break up modern society’s merely functional collectives into self-governing, voluntarily co-operating groups, capable of functioning outside the bureaucratic systems of Big Business and Big Government.”  [Brave New World Revisited. On www.goodreads.com.]

Jackson, Andrew. I am one of those who do not believe that a national debt is a national blessing, but rather a curse to a republic; inasmuch as it is calculated to raise around the administration a moneyed aristocracy dangerous to the liberties of the country.  [To L. H. Colman, April 26, 1824.]

Jackson, Jesse. We must give the American worker the first option of ownership.  [Speech at Duquesne, PA, January 21, 1985.]

Jackson, Robert H. The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.  [U.S. Supreme Court, W. Va. State Board of Education v. Barnette, 1943.]

James, William. The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man’s nature.

Javits, Hon. Jacob K. One of the proven ways of getting workers more involved with their jobs is by dovetailing employee profit-sharing and stock ownership plans with greater responsibility sharing…. Trade unions in this country should…consider these arrangements much more carefully than they have up to now…. Expanded employee profit participation and stock ownership would provide workers with a greater measure of economic and social independence, thus stimulating increased productivity….

Jefferson, Thomas.  [Below are listed the quotations shown on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.  When appropriate, the original passages are added, with omitted language indication in bold lettering.]:

Panel One:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men. We . . . solemnly publish and declare, that these colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states. . . And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

Panel Two:

“Almighty God hath created the mind free. All attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens . . . are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion . . . No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship or ministry or shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion. I know but one code of morality for men whether acting singly or collectively.”

Original Passage:

“Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion . . . .”   [“A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom,” Section I.]

Panel Three:

“God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Establish a law for educating the common people. This it is the business of the state and on a general plan.”

Original Passages:

“But let them [members of the parliament of Great Britain] not think to exclude us from going to other markets to dispose of those commodities which they cannot use, or to supply those wants which they cannot supply. Still less let it be proposed that our properties within our own territories shall be taxed or regulated by any power on earth but our own. The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.”  [“A Summary View of the Rights of British America.”]

“For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labor. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.  [Notes on the State of Virginia.]

“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it. . .  [Notes on the State of Virginia.]

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.”  [The Autobiography.]

“Preach, my dear sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish & improve the law for educating the common people.”   [Letter to George Wythe, August 13, 1780.]

“It is an axiom in my mind that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of instruction. This it is the business of the state to effect, and on a general plan.”  [Letter to George Washington, January 4, 1786.]

Panel Four:

“I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”

Original Passage:

“I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the same coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”   [Letter to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1810.]

Jefferson, Thomas.  The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.  [A Summary View of the Rights of British America, B.1.135, July 1774.]

Jefferson, Thomas.  Our attachment to no nation upon earth should supplant our attachment to liberty. [Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms, B.1.215, June 26-July 6, 1775.]

Jefferson, Thomas.  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.  [Declaration of Independence, B.1.429, July 4, 1776.]

Jefferson, Thomas.  The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.  [Letter to W. S. Smith, B.12.356, Nov. 13, 1787.]

Jefferson, Thomas.   We have spent the prime of our lives in procuring [young men] the precious blessing of liberty. Let them spend theirs in shewing that it is the great parent of science and of virtue; and that a nation will be great in both always in proportion as it is free.  [Letter to Joseph Willard, B.14.699, March 24, 1789.]

Jefferson, Thomas.   I would rather be exposed to the inconveniencies attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.  [Letter to Archibald Stuart, B.22.436, Dec. 23, 1791.]

Jefferson, Thomas.   The last hope of human liberty in this world rests on us. We ought, for so dear a state to sacrifice every attachment and every enmity.  [Letter to William Duane, Ford 11:193, Mar. 28, 1811.]

Jefferson, Thomas.  The disease of liberty is catching; those armies will take it in the south, carry it thence to their own country, spread there the infection of revolution and representative government, and raise its people from the prone condition of brutes to the erect altitude of man. [To Lafayette, Ford 12.190, Dec. 26, 1820.]

Jefferson, Thomas.  The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.  [Letter to Richard Rush, L&B.15.283, Oct. 20, 1820.]

Jefferson, Thomas.  The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. Letter to Roger Weightman,  [Writings 1517, Jun. 24, 1826.]

Jefferson, Thomas.  A community of small farmers…land (property) owners, will be the only assurance that the freedom our republic offers will be guaranteed to each and every citizen.

Jefferson, Thomas.  At the time we were funding our national debt, we heard much about “a public debt being a public blessing”; that the stock representing it was a creation of active capital for the aliment of commerce, manufactures and agriculture. This paradox was well adapted to the minds of believers in dreams.  [Bergh, Writings of Thomas Jefferson. 13:420.]

Jefferson, Thomas.  I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable, but the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property… .   [Letter to James Madison, Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Virginia, and President of William and Mary College, October 28, 1785.]

Jefferson, Thomas.  If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied. The issuing power of money should be taken from the banks and restored to Congress and the people to whom it belongs.  [Quoted in Olive Cusing Dwinell, The Story of Our Money, 2nd ed. Boston: Forum Publishing Company, 1946, p. 84.

Jefferson, Thomas.  If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy.  [Bergh, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 10:342.]

Jefferson, Thomas.  Mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. Preamble to the Declaration of Independence,1776.]

Jefferson, Thomas.  I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.’  [Letter to the Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin, 1802.]

Jefferson, Thomas.  The banks themselves were doing business on capitals three-fourths of which were fictitious. This fictitious capital…is now to be lost, and to fall on somebody; it must take on those who have property to meet it, and probably on the less cautious part, who, not aware of the impending catastrophe, have suffered themselves to contract, or to be in debt, and must now sacrifice their property of a value many times the amount of the debt. We have been truly sowing the wind, and are now reaping the whirlwind. [Ford, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 10:133.]

Jefferson, Thomas.  We are completely saddled and bridled, and…the bank is so firmly mounted on us that we must go where [it] will guide.  [Bergh, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 9:337-38.]

Jefferson, Thomas.  We are overdone with banking institutions, which have banished the precious metals, and substituted a more fluctuating and unsafe medium…. These have withdrawn capital from useful improvements and employments to nourish idleness…. [These] are evils more easily to be deplored than remedied.  [Bergh, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 12:379-80.]

Jefferson, Thomas.  Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right.  [Letter to James Madison, Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Virginia, and President of William and Mary College, October 28, 1785.]

Jefferson, Thomas.   [W]e shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves; and consequently within what may be deemed the period of a generation, or the life of the majority.  [Bergh, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 13:358.]

Jefferson, Thomas.  [I]t is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.  [Letter to James Madison, Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Virginia, and President of William and Mary College, October 28, 1785.]

Jefferson, Thomas.  Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God   [Found among his papers after death.]

Jefferson, Thomas.  What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them.  [Letter to William Stephens Smith, 1787, ME 6:373, Papers 12:356.]

Jefferson, Thomas.   The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.  [Letter to Abigail Adams, 1787.]

Jefferson, Thomas.  The late rebellion in Massachusetts has given more alarm than I think it should have done. Calculate that one rebellion in thirteen states in the course of eleven years, is but one for each state in a century and a half. No country should be so long without one. Nor will any degree of power in the hands of government prevent insurrections.  [Letter to James Madison, 1787. ME 6:391.]

Jefferson, Thomas.   Governments, wherein the will of every one has a just influence… has its evils,… the principal of which is the turbulence to which it is subject. But weigh this against the oppressions of monarchy, and it becomes nothing. Malo periculosam libertatem quam quietam servitutem. [I prefer the tumult of liberty to the quiet of servitude.] Even this evil is productive of good. It prevents the degeneracy of government, and nourishes a general attention to the public affairs.  [Letter to James Madison, 1787. ME 6:64.]

Jefferson, Thomas.   God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion… We have had thirteen States independent for eleven years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half, for each State. What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion.  [Letter to William S. Smith, 1787. ME 6:372.]

Jefferson, Thomas.   Most codes extend their definitions of treason to acts not really against one’s country. They do not distinguish between acts against the government, and acts against the oppressions of the government. The latter are virtues, yet have furnished more victims to the executioner than the former, because real treasons are rare; oppressions frequent. The unsuccessful strugglers against tyranny have been the chief martyrs of treason laws in all countries.  [Report on Spanish Convention, 1792.]

Jefferson, Thomas.   If our country, when pressed with wrongs at the point of the bayonet, had been governed by its heads instead of its hearts, where should we have been now? Hanging on a gallows as high as Haman’s.  [Letter to Maria Cosway, 1786. ME 5:444.]

Jefferson, Thomas.   The commotions that have taken place in America, as far as they are yet known to me, offer nothing threatening. They are a proof that the people have liberty enough, and I could not wish them less than they have. If the happiness of the mass of the people can be secured at the expense of a little tempest now and then, or even of a little blood, it will be a precious purchase. ‘Malo libertatem periculosam quam quietem servitutem.’ Let common sense and common honesty have fair play, and they will soon set things to rights.  [Letter to Ezra Stiles, 1786. ME 6:25.]

Jefferson, Thomas.  The tumults in America I expected would have produced in Europe an unfavorable opinion of our political state. But it has not. On the contrary, the small effect of these tumults seems to have given more confidence in the firmness of our governments. The interposition of the people themselves on the side of government has had a great effect on the opinion here [in Europe].  [Letter to Edward Carrington, 1787. ME 6:57.]

Jefferson, Thomas.  An occasional insurrection will not weigh against the inconveniences of a government of force, such as are monarchies and aristocracies.  [Letter Jefferson to T. B. Hollis, July 2, 1787.  ME 6:155.]

Jefferson, Thomas.  Cherish…the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them.  [Letter to Edward Carrington, 1787. ME 6:58.]

John the Evangelist (attributed to Jesus of Nazareth).  “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. The hireling however, and who is not the shepherd, who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming, and deserts the sheep, and flees: and the wolf seizes, and scatters the sheep; the hireling however flees, for he is a worker for pay, and his concern is not for the sheep.” (Ego sum pastor bonus. Bonus pastor animam suam dat pro ovibus suis. Mercenarius autem, et qui non est pastor, cuius non sunt oves propriæ, videt lupum venientem, et dimittit oves, et fugit: et lupus rapit, et dispergit oves; mercenarius autem fugit, quia mercenarius est, et non pertinet ad eum de ovibus.) Evangelium Secundum Ioannem,  [John 10:11—13.]

John XXIII.  A social doctrine has to be translated into reality and not just merely formulated. This is particularly true of the Christian social doctrine whose light is Truth, its objective Justice and its driving force Love.  [Mater et Magistra. 1961.]

John XXIII.  [T]he right of private property, including that pertaining to goods devoted to productive enterprises, is permanently valid. Indeed, it is rooted in the very nature of things, whereby we learn that individual men are prior to civil society, and hence, that civil society is to be directed toward man as its end. Indeed, the right of private individuals to act freely in economic affairs is recognized in vain, unless they are at the same time given an opportunity of freely selecting and using things necessary for the exercise of this right. Moreover, experience and history testify that where political regimes do not allow to private individuals the possession also of productive goods, the exercise of human liberty is violated or completely destroyed in matters of primary importance. Thus it becomes clear that in the right of property, the exercise of liberty finds both a safeguard and a stimulus.  [Mater et Magistra, Section 109. 1961.]

John XXIII.  Economic conditions of this kind have occasioned popular doubt as to whether, under present circumstances, a principle of economic and social life, firmly enunciated and defended by our predecessors, has lost its force or is to be regarded as of lesser moment; namely, the principle whereby it is established that men have from nature a right of privately owning goods, including those of a productive kind. Such a doubt has no foundation. For the right of private property, including that pertaining to goods devoted to productive enterprises, is permanently valid.  [Mater et Magistra, Op. cit., §§108—109, 1961.]

John XXIII.  Small and medium-sized holdings in agriculture, in the arts and crafts, in commerce and industry, should be safeguarded and fostered. Such enterprises should join together in mutual-aid societies in order that the services and benefits of large-scale enterprises will be available to them. So far as these larger enterprises are concerned, work agreements should in some way be modified by partnership arrangements.  [Mater et Magistra, §84, 1961.]

John XXIII.  [I]t remains true that precautionary activities of public authorities in the economic field, although widespread and penetrating, should be such that they not only avoid restricting the freedom of private citizens, but also increase it, so long as the basic rights of each individual person are preserved inviolate.  [Mater et Magistra (“Mother and Teacher”), §55 1961.]

John Paul II.  In our time, in particular, there exists another form of ownership which is becoming no less important than land: the possession of know-how, technology and skill. The wealth of the industrialized nations is based much more on this kind of ownership than on natural resources. [Centesimus Annus, §32, 1991.]

John Paul II.  In the light of today’s “new things,” we have reread the relationship between individual or private property and the universal destination of material wealth. Man fulfills himself by using his intelligence and freedom. In so doing a person utilizes the things of this world as objects and instruments and makes them his own. The foundation of the right to private initiative and ownership is to be found in this activity. By means of his work a person commits himself, not only for his own sake but also for others and with others. Man works in order to provide for the needs of his family, his community, his nation, and ultimately all humanity. Moreover, a person collaborates in the work of his fellow employees, as well as in the work of suppliers and in the customers’ use of goods, in a progressively expanding chain of solidarity. Ownership of the means of production, whether in industry or agriculture, is just and legitimate if it serves useful work. It becomes illegitimate, however, when it is not utilized or when it serves to impede the work of others, in an effort to gain a profit which is not the result of the overall expansion of work and the wealth of society, but rather is the result of curbing them or of illicit exploitation, speculation or the breaking of solidarity among working people. Ownership of this kind has no justification, and represents an abuse in the sight of God and man. [Centesimus Annus, §43. 1991.]

John Paul II.  Economic activity, especially the activity of a market economy, cannot be conducted in an institutional, juridical or political vacuum. On the contrary, it presupposes sure guarantees of individual freedom and private property, as well as a stable currency and efficient public services. [Centessimus Annus, § 48. 1991.]

John Paul II. On the basis of his work each person is fully entitled to consider himself a part owner of the great workbench at which he is working with everyone else. A way toward that goal could be found by associating labor with the ownership of capital [through] joint ownership of the means of work, sharing by the workers in the management and/or profits of businesses, so-called shareholding by labor, etc.  [Laborem Exercens. 1981.]

John Paul II.  Only the human being as a person is the true center of morality, whereas every society and social group bases its morality on the human being as a person and derives its morality from this source. The concept of social morality is, of course, something very real and continually evolving, but it in no way represents an attempt to substitute society for the human person as the substantial subject of moral values and the proper center of morality.  [Karol Wojtyła, “The Problem of the Theory of Morality,” Person and Community: Selected Essays. New York: Peter Lang, 2008, 155.]  

John Paul II.  The Church’s teaching on ownership diverges radically from collectivism as proclaimed by Marxism and “rigid” capitalism. The primacy of the person over things [can be restored through] joint ownership of the means of work.  [Laborem Exercens. 1981.]

Johnson, Andrew.  [The enactment of the Homestead Act] would create the strongest tie between the citizen and the Government—he would with cheerfulness contribute his proportionable part of the taxes to defray the expenses of the political system under which he lived. [Congressional Globe (Appendix), June 20, 1850, p. 951.]

Johnson, Dr. Samuel.  The inevitable consequence of poverty is dependence.  [Works, vii, 299.]

Joint Economic Committee of Congress.  To begin to diffuse the ownership of capital and to provide an opportunity for citizens of moderate incomes to become owners of capital rather than relying solely on their labor as a source of income and security, the Committee recommends the adoption of a national policy to foster the goal of broadened ownership.

To provide a realistic opportunity for more U.S. citizens to become owners of capital, and to provide an expanded source of equity financing for corporations, it should be made national policy to pursue the goal of broadened capital ownership…. Whatever the means used, a basic objective should be to distribute newly created capital broadly among the population. [Hearings on “Broadening the Ownership of New Capital,” Joint Economic Committee Report, March 10, 1976.]

Justinian: Justice is the constant and eternal purpose that renders to each his due. (Iustitia est constans et perpetua voluntas ius suum cuique tribuendi.)  [Corpus Iuris Civilis AD 533 — Law Code of Justinian.]

Justinian: These are the precepts of the law: to live honestly, to harm no one, to render each his due. (Iuris præcepta sunt hæc: honeste vivere, alterum non lædere, suum cuique tribuere.)  [Corpus Iuris Civilis AD 533—Law Code of Justinian.]

Kanner, Gideon (Professor of law emeritus at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles).  Consider the Constitution. What we have here is a grim reminder that the liberties protected by the Bill of Rights are not neatly divisible into “property rights” and “personal liberties.” Even where the invasion is “only” of one’s property rights, it often implicates violation of other rights as well, even the right to life itself. Here is an object lesson that where one category of fundamental constitutional rights is not secure from governmental overreaching, neither are the others. All of which brings to mind the insight of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who observed in 1972 that “the dichotomy between personal liberties and property rights is a false one. Property does not have rights. People have rights. In fact, a fundamental interdependence exists between the personal right to liberty and the personal right in property. Neither could have meaning without the other.”

And if that is not enough, reflect on the fact that there are no societies in the world where a high degree of personal and political liberty does not correlate strongly with economic liberty. There may well be a moral in that too.  [“Rule of Law,” The Wall Street Journal, August 25, 1993, p. A9.]

Kasun, Jacqueline.  In the first place, there is no evidence at all that the planned economies achieve a higher degree of economic justice than does the free market. Even if we assume that there is a consensus on the need to redistribute purchasing power, it can be done without destroying the freedom of choice and efficiency of the market economy… [B]ut those who espouse any kind of planning in the interests of justice and fairness to the poor, never favor voluntary solutions to the problems they perceive in the distribution of income or property. When given the opportunity, the public-planning advocates have invariably accumulated as much power as possible over income and property. Stripped of their masks, what they really want is not justice but control over other people’s lives.  [The War Against Population, The Economics and Ideology of Population Control, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1988, pp. 76-77.]

Keats, John. The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.

Kelso, Louis O.   [From “Karl Marx: The Almost Capitalist,” American Bar Association Journal, March 1957.]:

Error No. 2:

Marx’s Failure to Understand the Political Significance of Property.

Before examining Marx’s second critical error, it may be helpful to take note of what the concept “property” means in law and economics. It is an aggregate of the rights, powers and privileges, recognized by the laws of the nation, which an individual may possess with respect to various objects. Property is not the object owned, but the sum total of the “rights” which an individual may “own” in such an object. These in general include the rights of (1) possessing, (2) excluding others, (3) disposing or transferring, (4) using, (5) enjoying the fruits, profits, product or increase, and (6) of destroying or injuring, if the owner so desires. In a civilized society, these rights are only as effective as the laws which provide for their enforcement. The English common law, adopted into the fabric of American law, recognizes that the rights of property are subject to the limitations that

(1) things owned may not be so used as to injure others or the property of others, and

(2) that they may not be used in ways contrary to the general welfare of the people as a whole. From this definition of private property, a purely functional and practical understanding of the nature of property becomes clear.

Property in everyday life, is the right of control.

Property in Land.  With respect to property in land, we need merely note that the acquisition of an original title to land from a sovereign is a political act, and not the result of operations of the economy. If the original distribution of land unduly favors any group or type or persons, it is a political defect and not a defect in the operation of the economy as such. A capitalistic economy assumes and recognizes the private ownership of land. It may, as under the federal and state mining laws and federal homestead acts, encourage private ownership of land by facilitating private purchasing of mining, timber, agricultural, residential or recreational lands.

Property in Capital.  In a capitalistic economy, private ownership in all other articles of wealth is equal in importance to property in land. From the standpoint of the distributive aspects of a capitalistic economy, property in capital–the tools, machinery, equipment, plants, power systems, railroads, trucks, tractors, factories, financial working capital and the like–is of special significance.  This is true because of the growing dependence of production upon capital instruments.

Of the three components of production land is the passive1 source of almost all material things except those which come from the air and the sea, while labor and capital are the active factors of production. Labor and capital produce the goods and services of the economy, using raw materials obtained, for the most part, from land.  Just as private property in land includes the right to all rents, the proceeds of sale of minerals and other elements or substances contained in land, private property in capital includes the right to the wealth produced by capital. The value added to iron ore by the capital instruments of a steel mill becomes the property of the owners of the steel mill. So in the case of all other capital instruments.

Property in Labor. What is the relationship of the worker to the value which he creates through his work? It has been said that no one has ever questioned the right of a worker to the fruits of his labor. Actually, as was long ago recognized by John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau, the right of the worker to the value he creates is nothing more than the particular type of private property applicable to labor. Each worker, they said, has a right of private property in his capacity to produce wealth through his labor and in the value which he creates.

Kelso, Louis O.  All this plan does is make everybody a capitalist. I know that the New York Stock Exchange says there are 25 million shareholders in the United States, but let me tell you something: about 15 million of those people could save their dividends for 10 years and maybe buy a new suit. That’s not what I call capitalism.

Kelso, Louis O. Equality of economic opportunity, in the context of private property, means equality of opportunity for the millions of capital-less households of today to buy, pay for, and employ in their lives the non-human factor of production, capital.

Kelso, Louis O.  Everyone should own a piece of the wealth-producing capital of this country, but not everyone can be a manager. Or should be.

Kelso, Louis O.  Full employment is a socially hazardous goal. In effect, it aspires to restore through political expedients the pre-industrial state of toil that science, engineering, technology and modern management are pledged to overcome.

Kelso, Louis O.  Had Marx understood the implications of the principles of capitalistic distribution which presented themselves to him as “appearances” only, he might have become a revolutionary capitalist instead of a revolutionary socialist.

Kelso, Louis O.  Hard-core structural poverty has a counterpart at the apex: hard-core structural affluence.

Kelso, Louis O.  I’m a secret nonmember of the establishment. This isn’t a grubby kind of revolution I’m talking about. This isn’t Che Guevara stuff. I don’t want to live on berries in the woods — I don’t think anybody does.

Kelso, Louis O.  If capital produces most of the economy’s wealth and income is distributed on the basis of productive input, the individual can hardly reach his goal — an affluent level of income — solely by means of his labor.

Kelso, Louis O.  If we functionally define a capitalist household as one that receives at least half of the annual income it spends on consumption in the form of return on invested capital, less than 1 percent of United States households are capitalists.

Kelso, Louis O.  It is the institutions of society, not parental genes, that bestow the blessings of ownership of productive capital.

Kelso, Louis O.  Labor is the source of subsistence, capital is the source of affluence. My idea is to make everyone a capitalist, and therefore, financially secure.

Kelso, Louis O.  Most of us owe instead of own. And the less the economy needs our labor, the less able we are to “save” our way to capital ownership.

Kelso, Louis O.  No Keynesian has ever proposed a measure designed to make the individual more productive; for that would require institutional means for enabling him to acquire ownership of the nonhuman factor of production: capital.

Kelso, Louis O.  Our present predicament comes from the fact that running the economy on blood is no longer fashionable. We can’t end this depression with another war.

Kelso, Louis O.  Political power without economic power is sterile.

Kelso, Louis O.  Private property works like circuitry in electronics, or piping in hydraulics. It conveys wages to the owners of labor power, as well as the various forms of nonwage property income to the owners of capital. In itself, it is no more responsible for maldistribution of purchasing power than the science of bookkeeping is responsible for bankruptcy.

Kelso, Louis O.  Rather than providing him with economic opportunity, the Act of that name seems designed to make the poor man do penance all his life for the sin of being born into a non-capital-owning family… .One searches it in vain for measure designed to provide economic opportunity to the capital owner. But nobody proposes to educate, train, or rehabilitate either him or his children, even when their “unemployment” is notorious.

Kelso, Louis O.  Take Milton Friedman, he sits at his desk pontificating about such bunk as the monetary system being the answer to our problems. The monetary system is a legal contrivance. Property, not money, is real wealth. It’s physical, not legal.

Kelso, Louis O.  Technology has no function except to save labor. Yet how often do we hear that the purpose of new capital formation is to create jobs?

Kelso, Louis O.  Technology plows through history at an accelerating rate, shifting the burden of production off labor into the nonhuman factor because man uses his highest ingenuity to avoid servile labor.

Kelso, Louis O.  Technology plows through history at an accelerating rate, shifting the burden of production off labor onto the nonhuman factor because man uses his highest ingenuity to avoid servile labor.

Kelso, Louis O. That which is inherently nonfinanceable is financed. That which is inherently financeable is not financed. And the illogic of poverty amidst eagerness and ability to produce plenty goes on.

Kelso, Louis O. The first principle of economic symmetry: building the economic power to consume simultaneously with the industrial power to produce.

Kelso, Louis O. The idea that full employment without property ownership will solve the world’s problems is utter nonsense. The Keynesian concept that the function of capital is merely to amplify labor, not independently produce wealth is simply blindness.

Kelso, Louis O. The New York Stock Exchange says there are 25 million shareholders in the United States. But, let me tell you something: about 15 million of them could save their dividends for 10 years and maybe buy a new suit. That’s not what I call being a “capitalist.”

Kelso, Louis O.  The one important distinction between the two factors of production is that in a free society, ownership of the human factor, labor, cannot be concentrated while ownership of the non-human factor, capital, can be.

Kelso, Louis O.  The path the capitalist revolution will take faces in exactly the opposite direction from that taken by the communist revolution. It seeks to diffuse the private ownership of capital instead of abolishing it entirely. It seeks to make all men capitalists instead of preventing anyone from being a capitalist by making the State the only capitalist.

Kelso, Louis O.  The point is to make the pie grow faster and distribute the new growth more equitably.

Kelso, Louis O.  The political objective of universal capitalism is maximum individual autonomy, the separation of political power wielded by the holders of public office from economic power held by citizens, and the broad diffusion of privately owned economic power.

Kelso, Louis O.  The poor lack money. They lack money because they do not know the secret of productive wealth. They know it is possible to be old, unemployed, uneducated, lazy — even halt, deaf, dumb, and blind—and still be excessively rich. But you have to be in on the secret, and the poor by definition are not.

Kelso, Louis O. The primary cause of disorder and lawlessness today, as throughout history, is the poverty of the many in contrast to the affluence of the few. But a new element of unrest has been added: a growing awareness that mass poverty is caused by defective institutions that prevent our harnessing the physical capabilities of science, engineering, management and labor to create general affluence; in other words, a growing awareness that poverty in any country that is or can be industrialized, is man’s not nature’s fault.

Kelso, Louis O. The purpose of finance is to enable business to acquire the ownership of capital instruments before it has saved the funds to buy and pay for them. The logic used by business in investing is things that will pay for themselves is not today available to the 95% born without capital. Most of us owe instead of own. And the less the economy needs our labor, the less able we are to “save” our way to capital ownership.

Kelso, Louis O. The rising productivity of labor is a myth, a statistical illusion created by measuring combined output in terms of labor input.

Kelso, Louis O. The scarcity that afflicts the world is not the fault of either science or nature. The cause is defective economic institutions which abort technology’s affluence producing potential.

Kelso, Louis O. The schemes to set up blacks in cleaning stores, gas stations, hamburger stands and fried-chicken franchises, all the low-profit, low-capital enterprises, will rivet the Black man to the least remunerative section of the economy forever. The best such prospects offer are the dissatisfactions of blue-collar life. The big money ain’t in pumping rationed gas in an Amoco station leased in your very own name, but in having stock in Exxon.

Kelso, Louis O. The sole missing link is the recognition that the acquisition of capital ownership by the millions is an indispensable goal. That is the turning point — our recognition of the proper goal.

Kelso, Louis O. The totalitarian toil-state originates in the propertylessness of the majority.  [“California Living,” San Francisco Examiner Sunday Magazine, May 17, 1970, p. 24.]

Kelso, Louis O. The uneasy ghost of Marx must suffer the torments of the damned at the truth glaring from the pages of history that one does not abolish property by transferring it to the state.

Kelso, Louis O. The way the system now works, credit is extended to those who don’t need it and denied to those who are in desperate need of it.

Kelso, Louis O.  There is more to life than material well-being. Who would claim that the wholly wage-dependent family enjoys the dignity, the security, the range of choice and the autonomy (not to mention the leisure and freedom) of the family even partially supported by capital ownership?

Kelso, Louis O.  There’s only one honest way to measure affluence; that’s by comparing the capability of producing goods and services with the desire of people to enjoy them. It’s a lousy, crooked trick to compare this society with China or some such place and then say we’re affluent. It’s a piece of intellectual crookery even to compare this economy with itself ten or twenty years ago. We should compare what we have with what we could have.

Kelso, Louis O.  Two-factor economics makes it clear that our economic problem is not what one-factor (labor-centric) thinkers assert: an inequitable distribution of income. It is an inequitable distribution of productive power, from which an unworkable distribution of income results.

Kelso, Louis O.  We have an economic policy that is just about 10,000 years out of date.

Kelso, Louis O.  What have the masses been clamoring for? Jobs and welfare, and they got ’em. They’ve also got unions and managements like two armies converting the whole economy into a battleground with the customers as victims, except that the victims are also in the army. They think in battle terms by day and like customers at night.

Kelso, Louis O.  When capital owners are few, the private-property conduits of necessity create vast savings reservoirs for those few. If there were many owners, the same conduits would broadly irrigate the economy with purchasing power.

Kelso, Louis O.  Work is a means; it is not an end. And for any tasks that can be performed or eliminated by a capital instrument, human labor is not the best means…. Furthermore, we have science, engineering and management — the three disciplines — that really plan and control the production of goods and services, trying to eliminate labor. Who the hell is government to come along and try to create labor? The people who are producing wealth are trying to eliminate toil, while the politicians are trying to create it. This to me is absence of logic, absence of plan, absence of system, absence of thought.

Kelso, Louis.  The sooner the world solves its economic problems, the sooner its inhabitants can afford leisure and peace and get on with the non-material things that are inherently important: the work of mind and spirit that is gloriously and uniquely human, the work that no machine can ever do.

Kelso, Louis.  While no inference is intended here, it is worth noting, in connection with Milton Friedman’s comment that “Kelso just turned Marx upside down,” that it is not necessarily amiss to turn a fellow upside down if that in fact straightens out his thinking.  [Handwritten note on flyleaf of a copy of C. H. Douglas’s Social Credit, June 27, 1973.]

Kelso, Louis O. and Adler, Mortimer J.  Money and Credit, being merely representative of real wealth, cannot expand at a faster rate than real wealth without bringing about inflation. A just economy requires a stable currency of uniform purchasing power. [The New Capitalists, “H. Inflation Control and Concurrent Reduction of Consumer Debt,” p.57.]

Kelso, Louis O. and Adler, Mortimer J.  The inflationary danger of massive purchasing power accumulated in the highly concentrated estates of the largest capitalist households and in the semi-socialized trusts of foundations to which these estates are customarily transferred today under the threat of tax confiscation would age eliminated as these estates were diffused, through normal transfers by gifts and bequests, under legislative changes designed to encourage transfers to sub monopolistic beneficiaries. [The New Capitalists, “H. Inflation Control and Concurrent Reduction of Consumer Debt,” p.58.]

Kelso, Louis O. and Hetter, Patricia.  Money is not a part of the visible sector of the economy; people do not consume money. Money is not a physical factor of production, but rather a yardstick for measuring economic input, economic outtake and the relative values of the real goods and services of the economic world. Money provides a method of measuring obligations, rights, powers and privileges. It provides a means whereby certain individuals can accumulate claims against others, or against the economy as a whole, or against many economies. It is a system of symbols that many economists substitute for the visible sector and its productive enterprises, goods and services, thereby losing sight of the fact that a monetary system is a part only of the invisible sector of the economy, and that its adequacy can only be measured by its effect upon the visible sector.  [Two-Factor Theory: The Economics of Reality, Random House, 1967, p.54.]

Kelso, Louis O. and Kelso, Patricia Hetter.  The owners of labor, on the other hand, are being taught, by the most powerful and well-publicized examples, that the highest rewards are not for production, but for the employment of organized power to take over a share of what others produce.  [Two-Factor Theory: The Economics of Reality, Random House, 1967, p. 46.]

Kelso, Louis O. and Kelso, Patricia Hetter.  Thus, the capital owner is not a parasite or a rentier but a worker — a capital worker. A distinction between labor work and capital work suggests the lines along which we could develop economic institutions capable of dealing with increasingly capital-intensive production, as our present institutions cannot.

There is another consideration. Economies can no longer solve their income distribution problem through full employment, even if this ever retreating and questionable goal were entirely achievable. Where capital workers replace labor workers as the major suppliers of goods and services, labor employment alone becomes inadequate because labor’s share of the income arising from production cannot provide the progressively better standard of living that technology is making possible. Labor produces subsistence at best. Capital can produce affluence. To enjoy affluence, all households must engage to an increasing extent in capital work.  [Kelso and Hetter, Op. cit., p. 7.]

Kelso, Louis O. and Kelso, Patricia Hetter.  People are hungering for property — for a secure, permanent and independent link with spaceship earth that ownership represents and which only ownership can protect or defend.

Kelso, Louis O. and Kelso, Patricia Hetter.   But would the young do any better under the same circumstances? Will they do any better when their turns come? The answer is that youth would not and cannot, given the financial and economic framework within which the elders are operating. While the moral convictions of individuals are important in the long run, it is institutions that determine the immediate course of events — particularly the institutions of finance.  [Op. cit., p.163.]

Kelso, Louis O. and Kelso, Patricia Hetter.  Human affairs are governed by a hierarchy of values, each corresponding to one of the two sides of man’s nature.  The priority order of particular activities on these tables of value is inverse, so that an activity which occupies first place on one is in last place in the other.  Man is an animal, and his animal needs and wants are the subject of economics.  But he is also a spiritual being, with a mind unique in the natural order; he is a civilized or human being.  It is from the dual nature of man as both animal and human that the dual scale of values governing his life arises.  One is a hierarchy of urgency; the other is a hierarchy of importance.  The history of man, at least as we read it, leaves no doubt that he places the highest value on the goods of the mind and the spirit — what Plato called “the wares of the soul; that in the human scale of things, it is the goods of civilization — the arts, sciences, religion, education, philosophy, statesmanship and the like, that weigh the heaviest.… It is equally clear, however, that for all but the most exceptional human beings, the goods and services that minister to the need and desire for creature comforts weigh heaviest on the scale of urgency. Physical goods and services of economics are more urgent.  It is only when man’s material needs and desires are satisfied and he is secure in his belief that they will continue to be satisfied — when, in a word, he becomes affluent—that the urgency of economic matters disappears, and the truly important things move into the foreground of consciousness.… Economic planning for a free industrial society that fails to take into account the significance of the inverse dual scale of values implicit in man’s nature is predestined to error.  The lesson to be learned … is simple: solve the economic problem of society first, and a floodtide of goods of civilization will follow.”  [Two-Factor Theory: The Economics of Reality, pp. 111-112.]

Kemp, Jack.  …giving tax incentives for more labor ownership of company stock will do more to create jobs and increase productivity than all the “emergency full employment” bills proposed.

Kennedy, John F.  If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable. [“Parallel Sights: Revolution,” Hastings Law News, 2/18/75.]

Keynes, John Maynard.  It is preferable to regard labour, including, of course, the personal services of the entrepreneur, and his assistants, as the sole factor of production (Italics added), operating in a given environment of technique, natural resources, capital equipment and effective demand. This is why we have been able to take labour as the sole physical unit which we require in our economic system, apart from units of money and of time.  [The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, 1936, pp. 213-14.]

Keynes, John Maynard.  For my own part, I believe that there is social and psychological justification for significant inequalities of incomes and wealth.  [General Theory, Book VI, Chapter 24, Section I.]

Keynes, John Maynard.  I see, therefore, the rentier aspect of capitalism as a transitional phase which will disappear when it has done its work. And with the disappearance of its rentier aspect much else in it besides will suffer a sea-change. It will be, moreover, a great advantage of the order of events which I am advocating, that the euthanasia of the rentier, of the functionless investor, will be nothing sudden, merely a gradual but prolonged continuance of what we have seen recently in Great Britain, and will need no revolution.  [General Theory, Book VI, Chapter 24, Section II.]

Keynes, John Maynard.  If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people, on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.

Keynes, John Maynard.  It is not the ownership of the instruments of production which it is important for the State to assume. If the State is able to determine the aggregate amount of resources devoted to augmenting the instruments and the basic rate of reward to those who own them, it will have accomplished all that is necessary. Moreover, the necessary measures of socialization can be introduced gradually and without a break in the general traditions of society.  [General Theory, Book VI, Chapter 24, Section III.]

Keynes, John Maynard.  Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only a security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become “profiteers,” who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuate wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.  [“Europe After the Treaty,” The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1919.]

Keynes, John Maynard. The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably.  [The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Chapter 2, Section III.]

Keynes, John Maynard. [T]he ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil. [General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Book VI, Section V.]

Khaldun, Muhammad Ibn  (14th Century Arab jurist, historian, philosopher, diplomat, cabinet officer and general).  When incentive to acquire and obtain property is gone, people no longer make efforts to acquire any.…Those who infringe upon property rights commit an injustice.… If this occurs repeatedly, all incentives to cultural enterprise are destroyed and they cease utterly to make an effort. This leads to destruction and ruin of civilization.  [Mukaddimah, 40 volumes written from A.D. 1375-1378, translated by Franz Rosenthal, Vol. 2, pp. 103-109, 1967.]

Khrushchev, Nikita S. “Freedom” in capitalist countries exists only for those who possess money and who consequently hold power.  [Speech to 21st Party Congress, New York Times, February 1, 1959.]

Kilpatrick, James J.  [Louis Kelso’s] formula sounds like Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. The whole theory sounds crazy. But, then, one may recall, they said all that of Copernicus too.  [January 20, 1972.]

King, Coretta Scott.  All we seek is an America where every person is given the chance to productively contribute to his country and where he can receive a fair and equitable share of the wealth that production creates.

King Jr., Martin Luther.   It has been my conviction ever since reading Rauschenbusch that any religion which professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the social and economic conditions that scar the soul, is a spiritually moribund religion only waiting for the day to be buried. [“Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” excerpted from Stride Toward Freedom, 1958.]

I had also learned that the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice. Although I came from a home of economic security and relative comfort, I could never get out of my mind the economic insecurity of many of my playmates and the tragic poverty of those living around me. During my late teens I worked two summers, against my father’s wishes–he never wanted my brother and me to work around white people because of the oppressive conditions–in a plant that hired both Negroes and whites. Here I saw economic injustice firsthand, and realized that the poor white was exploited just as much as the Negro. Through these early experiences I grew up deeply conscious of the varieties of injustice in our society. [Ibid.]

Man is not made for the state; the state is made for man. To deprive man of freedom is to relegate him to the status of a thing, rather than elevate him to the status of a person. Man must never be treated as a means to the end of the state, but always as an end within himself. [Ibid.]

T]ruth is found neither in Marxism nor in traditional capitalism. Each represents a partial truth. Historically capitalism failed to see the truth in collective enterprise, and Marxism failed to see the truth in individual enterprise. Nineteenth century capitalism failed to see that life is social and Marxism failed and still fails to see that life is individual and personal. The Kingdom of God is neither the thesis of individual enterprise nor the antithesis of collective enterprise, but a synthesis which reconciles the truths of both. [Ibid.]

With all of its false assumptions and evil methods, communism grew as a protest against the hardships of the underprivileged. Communism in theory emphasized a classless society, and a concern for social justice, though the world knows from sad experience that in practice it created new classes and a new lexicon of injustice. [Ibid.] [C]apitalism is always in danger of inspiring men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life. We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to humanity-thus capitalism can lead to a practical materialism that is as pernicious as the materialism taught by communism. [Ibid.]

Personalism’s insistence that only personality-finite and infinite-is ultimately real strengthened me in two convictions: it gave me metaphysical and philosophical grounding for the idea of a personal God, and it gave me a metaphysical basis for the dignity and worth of all human personality. [Ibid.]

A sixth basic fact about nonviolent resistance is that it is based on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice. Consequently, the believer in nonviolence has deep faith in the future. This faith is another reason why the nonviolent resister can accept suffering without retaliation. For he knows that in his struggle for justice he has cosmic companionship. It is true that there are devout believers in nonviolence who find it difficult to believe in a personal God. But even these persons believe in the existence of some creative force that works for universal wholeness. Whether we call it an unconscious process, an impersonal Brahman, or a Personal Being of matchless power and infinite love, there is a creative force in this universe that works to bring the disconnected aspects of reality into a harmonious whole. [Ibid.] [A]gape means recognition of the fact that all life is interrelated. All humanity is involved in a single process, and all men are brothers. To the degree that I harm my brother, no matter what he is doing to me, to that extent I am harming myself. [Ibid.]

King Jr., Martin Luther.   I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice. […] Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. [“Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” 1963.]

King Jr., Martin Luther.  When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.  [“I Have A Dream” Speech, 1963.]

King Jr., Martin Luther.  The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.  [Speech, “Where Do We Go From Here?” by Martin Luther King, Jr. made to the Tenth Anniversary Convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (S.C.L.C) in Atlanta on August 16, 1967. Dr. King projected in it the issues which led to Poor People’s March on Washington. From Foner, Philip S., The Voice of Black America: New York, 1972.]

A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will “thingify” them and make them things. And therefore, they will exploit them and poor people generally economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and it will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. What I’m saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, “America, you must be born again! . . .[Ibid.]

What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. . . . [Ibid.]

Another basic challenge is to discover how to organize our strength in terms of economic and political power. [Ibid.]

Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change. Walter Reuther defined power one day. He said, “Power is the ability of a labor union like the U.A.W. to make the most powerful corporation in the world, General Motors, say ‘Yes’ when it wants to say ‘No.’ That’s power.” [Ibid.]

Now a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often have problems with power. There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly. [Ibid.] [A] host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts among husbands, wives and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on the scale of dollars is eliminated. [Ibid.] [T]he Movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s market place. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question, “Who owns the oil?” You begin to ask the question, “Who owns the iron ore?”  [Ibid.]

One night, a juror came to Jesus and he wanted to know what he could do to be saved. Jesus didn’t get bogged down in the kind of isolated approach of what he shouldn’t do. Jesus didn’t say, “Now Nicodemus, you must stop lying.” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, you must stop cheating if you are doing that.” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, you must not commit adultery.” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, now you must stop drinking liquor if you are doing that excessively.” He said something altogether different, because Jesus realized something basic – that if a man will lie, he will steal. And if a man will steal, he will kill. So instead of just getting bogged down in one thing, Jesus looked at him and said, “Nicodemus, you must be born again.”

He said, in other words, “Your whole structure must be changed.” A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will “thingify” them — make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. What I am saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, “America, you must be born again!”  [Ibid.] [L]et us go out with a “divine dissatisfaction.” Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice. Let us be dissatisfied until those that live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security. Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history, and every family is living in a decent sanitary home. Let us be dissatisfied until the dark yesterdays of segregated schools will be transformed into bright tomorrows of quality, integrated education. Let us be dissatisfied until integration is not seen as a problem but as an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity. Let us be dissatisfied until men and women, however black they may be, will be judged on the basis of the content of their character and not on the basis of the color of their skin. Let us be dissatisfied. Let us be dissatisfied until every state capitol houses a governor who will do justly, who will love mercy and who will walk humbly with his God. Let us be dissatisfied until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. Let us be dissatisfied until that day when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together. and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid. Let us be dissatisfied. And men will recognize that out of one blood God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth. Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout “White Power!” — when nobody will shout “Black Power!” — but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power.  [Ibid.]

King Jr., Martin Luther.   When people get caught up with that which is right and they are willing to sacrifice for it, there is no stopping point short of victory. [Memphis Speech, 1968]

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.  [Ibid.]

King Jr., Martin Luther.  Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.  [Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Road to Socialism by Maurice Isserman in Civil Rights to Human Rights; Martin Luther King, Jr., and The Struggle for Economic Justice by Thomas F. Jackson, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006; In King’s Own Words, from a 1965 speech to the Negro American Labor Council quoted in Jackson’s book.]

King Jr., Martin Luther.   This is the great problem of mankind. We have inherited a large house, a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together, black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu, a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who because we can never live apart, must live with each other in peace. However deeply American Negroes are caught in the struggle to be at last home in our homeland of the U.S., we cannot ignore the larger world house in which we are also dwellers. Equality with whites will not solve the problems of either whites or Negroes if it means equality in a world society stricken by poverty, and in a universe doomed to extinction by war.”  [From Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (p. 167).  Quoted in In Love We Trust, by Virgil A. Wood, 2004.]

Kirk, Peter, (British MP).  Only when the workers themselves acquire capital will the threat to our current social order cease, says the Messiah of the “new economics”…Kelso has hitherto been regarded as an eccentric on the outer fringes of economic thinking. Today his ideas are being taken seriously in influential quarters. Some believe that Kelsoism could be to the 70’s what Keynes was to pre-war economic theory.  [The Illustrated London News, April 11, 1970.]

Kissinger, Henry A.  Nothing is more urgent than a serious, dare I say compassionate, debate as to where we are going at home and abroad. Technicians cannot master revolutions; every great achievement was an idea before it became a reality. Cathedrals cannot be built by those who are paralyzed by doubt or consumed by cynicism. If a society loses the capacity for great conception, it can be administered but not governed.  [Editorial, Washington Post, 4/15/73, p. 6.]

Klutznick, Philip M. (Chairman of the Board, Urban Investment and Development Company).  Two-Factor Theory is impressive and provocative and hopeful. Of course, universal capitalism as they conceive it and expound it would constitute the greatest revolution since the New Deal…. This is an approach to spreading affluence and not perpetuating poverty.

Kropotkin, Peter.  Think about the world you want to live and work in. What do you need to know to build the world? Demand that your teachers teach you that.

Krushchev, Nikita.  No one is born a Communist…in the Soviet Union farmers keep on looking in the barn for their horses even after they have given them to the collective.

Kuhn, Thomas.  Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend most all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Normal science, often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments. As a puzzle-solving activity, normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.  [The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 5. 1962.]

Kurland, Norman.  Capital Homesteading is the bottom-up solution that puts money power and ownership power in the hands of every citizen, and that is what distinguishes the Just Third Way from all competing systems that contain elements of both socialist and capitalist systems.   [Response of January 18, 2010 to Chris Dorf on Kelso Binary Economics Discussion Group Listserv, Kent State University.]

Kurland, Norman G. Much of the disorder in today’s world can be traced to mankind’s search for a just and orderly economic system, one in which everyone has an equal opportunity to participate as a wealth producer, one through which the forces of technological advance can be harnessed to liberate rather than to destroy human creativity, one in which rigid economic class barriers can be lifted.  [Kelsonian Monetary Weapons for Fighting Inflation, April 15, 1977.]

Kurland, Norman G.   What is clear from [Louis O. Kelso’s ] description is that money is a “social good,” an artifact of civilization invented to facilitate economic transactions for the common good. Like any other human tool or technology, this societal tool can be used justly or unjustly. It can be used by those who control it to suppress the natural creativity of the many, or it can be used to achieve economic liberation and prosperity for all affected by the money economy.  [“A New Look at Prices and Money: The Kelsonian Binary Model for Achieving Rapid Growth Without Inflation,” Journal of Socio-Economics, vol. 30, p. 495, 2001.]

Kurland, Norman G.  An agenda for a peaceful “Second American Revolution” is more than an economic agenda. It is based on the conception of America’s original revolutionaries to create “One nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.” In other words, it is based on the sovereignty of each person, a concept that subordinates the sovereignty of the state as a critical social prop for securing the life, liberty and property of each citizen. (These elements reflecting the intended higher sovereignty in the citizen, in my opinion, are implicit in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.)

Capital Homesteading would create an economic foundation for a society of economically independent human beings, where all powers of the state are dependent on the power of the people, not the other way around, as it is today under both Republican and Democratic rule. Under Capital Homesteading, freedom, justice and all the more important aspirations of humans (economics being the most urgent but not the most important of human needs) will finally blossom and we can then export our “Happy Revolution” to the world. The power of superior ideas rather than military and financial power will allow America to be admired again as the liberator of the poor and oppressed of the world. [2013].

Kurland, Norman G.   Just as to prohibit shouting fire in a crowded theater is a reasonable limitation on our universally appealing constitutional right to freedom of speech, the American people and their elected political representatives should debate whether to prohibit and punish speech that advocates violence against persons or groups engaging in non-violent speech and non-violent activities. The advocacy of violence against the non-violent ignites the passions of the “mad dogs” in every society and turns them loose against champions of new ideas intended to advance Peace, Prosperity and Freedom through Justice for all members of human society.

The free and open marketplace for reasoned debate cannot function in an orderly way when invaded by suicide bombers or those who incite violence and killing of non-violent advocates of change.  Ignoring such hate-mongering is a formula for spreading fear of free speech throughout society, leaving the pursuit of Truth, Love and Justice to those willing to martyr themselves for their commitment to the advance of civilization.

What prompted a mentally unstable person like Jared Lee Loughner to shoot Rep. Gabielle Giffords, or John Hinckley, Jr. to shot Ronald Reagan? Who helped from afar to “pull the trigger” in the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers and other champions of justice throughout human history?  To what extent was the preaching of religious and ideological extremists responsible for 9/11 and for the killing of thousands of innocent people by hate-filled suicide bombers?  How can the War of Ideas be won if the advocacy of violence against the non-violent is not suppressed as a social cancer threatening the sacred marketplace of free and open debate?  [Message on signing Move-On petition on Jan. 11, 2011.]

Langland, William.  The Spirit of Justice is the single most important seed Piers planted; if you don’t live by its teaching, your chance of salvation is nil. Unless Conscience and the Cardinal Virtues form the food that people live on, just take my word for it, they’re utterly lost — every single living soul among them!  [Piers Plowman, A new translation by A.V.C. Schmidt. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1992, page 239.]

Laski, Harold Joseph.  Those who know the normal life of the poor…will realize well enough that without economic security, liberty is not worth having.

Lawrence, David.  Workers would have a deeper interest in the success of the enterprise with which they are identified if they knew they would get a share of the profits each year….Experience has shown that productivity rises substantially under such an incentive system so that the higher pay to workers is not inflationary. There are other benefits to be derived…. Any program which gives employees a share of a company’s earnings would certainly induce more cooperation towards greater profits and fewer strikes.  [U. S. News and World Report.]

Le Guin, Ursula  (Author of science fiction and fantasy). Anger is a useful, perhaps indispensable tool in motivating resistance to injustice. But I think it is a weapon — a tool useful only in combat and self-defense…. Anger points powerfully to the denial of rights, but the exercise of rights can’t live and thrive on anger. It lives and thrives on the dogged pursuit of justice…. [2014 essay, “About Anger”]

Lederberg, Joshua (Nobel Prize winner).  The central moral issue of science is that we do not have a science of peace and hardly know where to begin in building one.  [The Washington Post, 9/20/69, p. A17.]

Leigh, Benjamin Watkins. Power and Property can be separated for a time by force or fraud — but divorced, never. For as soon as the pang of separation is felt…Property will purchase Power, or Power will take over Property.  [Speech on November 3, 1829, Proceedings and debates of the Virginia State Convention of 1829-1830, Volume 1, New York: DeCapo Press, 1971, p. 156; also quoted by Salvador Araneta in Bayanikasan — The Effective Democracy For All, Manila, Philippines: AIA Press, 1976, pp. 57-58]

Leo XIII.  [E]very man has by nature the right to possess property as his own. This is one of the chief points of distinction between man and the animal creation.  [Rerum Novarum, §§5-6, 1891.]

Leo XIII.  The fact that God has given the earth for the use and enjoyment of the whole human race can in no way be a bar to the owning of private property. For God has granted the earth to mankind in general, not in the sense that all without distinction can deal with it as they like, but rather that no part of it was assigned to any one in particular, and that the limits of private possession have been left to be fixed by man’s own industry, and by the laws of individual races. Moreover, the earth, even though apportioned among private owners, ceases not thereby to minister to the needs of all, inasmuch as there is not one who does not sustain life from what the land produces. Those who do not possess the soil contribute their labor; hence, it may truly be said that all human subsistence is derived either from labor on one’s own land, or from some toil, some calling, which is paid for either in the produce of the land itself, or in that which is exchanged for what the land brings forth.  Here, again, we have further proof that private ownership is in accordance with the law of nature. Truly, that which is required for the preservation of life, and for life’s well-being, is produced in great abundance from the soil, but not until man has brought it into cultivation and expended upon it his solicitude and skill. Now, when man thus turns the activity of his mind and the strength of his body toward procuring the fruits of nature, by such act he makes his own that portion of nature’s field which he cultivates — that portion on which he leaves, as it were, the impress of his personality; and it cannot but be just that he should possess that portion as his very own, and have a right to hold it without any one being justified in violating that right.  [Rerum Novarum, §§ 7-8, 1891.]

Leo XIII. With reason, then, the common opinion of mankind, little affected by the few dissentients who have contended for the opposite view, has found in the careful study of nature, and in the laws of nature, the foundations of the division of property, and the practice of all ages has consecrated the principle of private ownership, as being pre-eminently in conformity with human nature, and as conducing in the most unmistakable manner to the peace and tranquility of human existence.  [Rerum Novarum, § 11, 1891.]

Leo XIII.  It is clear that the main tenet of socialism, community of goods, must be utterly rejected, since it only injures those whom it would seem meant to benefit, is directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind, and would introduce confusion and disorder into the commonweal. The first and most fundamental principle, therefore, if one would undertake to alleviate the condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property.  [Rerum Novarum, § 15, 1891.]

Leo XIII.  We have seen that this great labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a principle that private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.  [Rerum Novarum, § 46, 1891.]

Leo XIII.  If this is done, excellent benefits will follow, foremost among which will surely be a more equitable division of goods. For the violence of public disorder has divided cities into two classes of citizens, with an immense gulf lying between them. On the one side is a faction exceedingly powerful because exceedingly rich. Since it alone has under its control every kind of work and business, it diverts to its own advantage and interest all production sources of wealth and exerts no little power in the administration itself of the State. On the other side are the needy and helpless masses, with minds inflamed and always ready for disorder. But if the productive activity of the multitude can be stimulated by the hope of acquiring some property in land, it will gradually come to pass that, with the difference between extreme wealth and extreme penury removed, one class will become neighbor to the other. Moreover, there will surely be a greater abundance of the things which the earth produces. For when men know they are working on what belongs to them, they work with far greater eagerness and diligence. Nay, in a word, they learn to love the land cultivated by their own hands, whence they look not only for food but for some measure of abundance for themselves and their dependents. All can see how much this willing eagerness contributes to an abundance of produce and the wealth of a nation. [Rerum Novarum, Op. cit., §66, 1891.]

Leo XIII. It must be assumed and established as a principle, that the right of private property must be regarded as sacred. Wherefore, the law ought to favor this right and, so far as it can, see that the largest possible number among the masses of the population prefer to own property.… But if the productive activity of the multitude can be stimulated by the hope of acquiring some property… , it will gradually come to pass that, with the difference between extreme wealth and extreme penury removed, one class will become the neighbor to the other.  [Rerum Novarum, §§ 6, 65, 66, 1891.]

Leo XIII.  Therefore those governing the State ought primarily to devote themselves to the service of individual groups and of the whole commonwealth, and through the entire scheme of laws and institutions to cause both public and individual well-being to develop spontaneously out of the very structure and administration of the state.  [Rerum Novarum, Op. cit., §48, 1891.]

Leo XIII.  Whoso turns his attention to the bitter strifes of these days and seeks a reason for the troubles that vex public and private life must come to the conclusion that a fruitful cause of the evils which now afflict, as well as of those which threaten us, lies in this: that false conclusions concerning divine and human things, which originated in the schools of philosophy, have crept into all the orders of the state, and have been accepted by the common consent of the masses. For since it is in the very nature of man to follow the guide of reason in his actions, if his intellect sins at all his will soon follows; and thus it happens that looseness of intellectual opinion influences human actions and perverts them. Whereas, on the other hand, if men be of sound mind and take their stand on true and solid principles, there will result a vast amount of benefits for the public and private good.  [Æterni Patris (“On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy”), §2, 1879.]

Leonard, John (Australian poet). The rich are different from you and me because they have more credit.

Leslie, John H. (Chairman, Signode Corporation).  In a little over 100 years we have moved from an economy where most people were motivated and rewarded by profits to one where millions of our fellow citizens are wage-earning employees who are not so motivated or rewarded…. [The corporate form of business organization lacks for employees the element of personal involvement in the fortunes of the enterprise that is inherent in partnerships and family farms that once accounted for the employment of almost everyone…. Millions…work for wages alone. They do not share in profits or losses except indirectly in ways not apparent to them…. The sharing of success as measured by profits…makes each individual feel he is a responsible member of the group. Profit sharing is the recognition of the importance of the individual, whatever his job, to the success of an enterprise.

Lincoln, Abraham.  I don’t believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich. It would do more harm than good. So while we do not propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else[Campaigning in New Haven, March 6, 1860.]

Lincoln, Abraham.  I take it that it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I don’t believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. So while we do not propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else.  [From “A Campaign Speech in New Haven,” March 6, 1860, in Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. by John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Vol. V, pp. 339-371, 360-361.]

Lincoln, Abraham.  You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot build character and courage by taking away men’s initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves. [Uncertain source.]

Lincoln, Abraham.  Property is the fruit of labor. Property is desirable, is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently to build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence. [Quoted in Freedom Daily, March 1990.]

Lincoln, Abraham.  I see in the near future a crisis approaching which unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.  Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption will follow and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people until the wealth of the country is aggregated in a few hands and then the Republic is destroyed.   [Letter to Col. William F. Elkins dated November 21, 1864. Ref. the Lincoln Encyclopedia, Archer H. Shaw (MacMillan, 1950, NY.]

Lincoln, Abraham.  Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.

Lincoln, Abraham.  That [slavery] is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.” No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.  [Lincoln-Douglas Debate, October 15, 1858, Alton, Illinois.]

Lincoln, Abraham.  The strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of the family relation, should be one uniting all working people, of all nations, and tongues, and kindreds. Nor should this lead to war upon property, or the owners of property. Property is the fruit of labor; property is desirable; is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.  [Reply to a Committee from the Workingman’s Association of New York, March 21, 1864. From The Lincoln Treasury, compiled by C. T. Harnesberger (Chicago: Wilcox & Follett Company, 1950.]

Lind, Michael.  In the course of the twenty-first century what may be called the “capital wage” could be added to [the labor wage and the social wage], so that middle-class Americans — not merely an affluent minority — might derive income from three sources rather than just two.  “Are we still a Middle-Class Nation?”, New America Foundation, The Atlantic Journal, Jan. 20, 2004.

Lippman, Walter.  Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.  [The Good Society.]

Lippmann, Walter.  It has been the fashion to speak of the conflict between human rights and property rights, and from this it has come to be widely believed that the use of private property is tainted with evil and should not be espoused by rational and civilized men…the only dependable foundation of personal liberty is the personal economic security of private property. The Good Society.

Locke, John.  ‘Tis true governments cannot be supported without great charge, and it is fit every one who enjoys a share of the protection should pay out of his estate his proportion for the maintenance of it. But still it must be with his own consent, i.e., the consent of the majority giving it either by themselves or their representatives chosen by them. For if any one shall claim a power to lay and levy taxes on the people, by his own authority, and without such consent of the people, he thereby invades the fundamental law of property, and subverts the end of government. For what property have I in that which another may by right take when he pleases to himself?  [John Locke, Second Treatise on Government. Op. cit., pp. 94-95.]

Locke, John.  The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings, capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom. For liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others, which cannot be where there is no law.  [Second Essay Concerning Civil Government. p. 37, para. 57.]

Locke, John.  The great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property; to which in the state of nature there are many things wanting.  [Two Treatises on Government, 1690, Chapter 7.]

Locke, John. The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property…. [Therefore] whenever the legislators endeavour to take away and destroy the property of the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience, and are left to the common refuge which God hath provided for all men against force and violence. Whensoever, therefore, the legislative shall transgress this fundamental rule of society, and either by ambition, fear, folly, or corruption, endeavour to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other, an absolute power over the lives, liberties, and estates of the people, by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people had put into the hands…and it devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty, and…provide for their own safety and security.  [Second Essay Concerning Civil Government, pp. 75-76, para. 222.]

Locke, John.  The supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his property without his own consent. For the preservation of property being the end of government, and that for which men enter into society, it necessarily supposes and requires that the people should have property, without which they must be supposed to lose by entering into society, which was the end for which they entered into it.  [Second Essay Concerning Civil Government, p. 57, para. 138.]

Locke, John.  Any single man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrant obedience or resistance to the commands of the civil magistrate; we are all qualified, entitled, and morally obliged to evaluate the conduct of our rulers. This political judgment, moreover, is not simply or primarily a right, but like self-preservation, a duty to God. As such it is a judgment that men cannot part with according to the God of Nature. It is the first and foremost of our inalienable rights without which we can preserve no other.

Long, Senator Russell B.  Tax policy alone may not be adequate if expanded ownership is ever to become a reality.  It seems to me that we will have to do something on a monetary side as well and I am speaking in terms of using the government powers through the Federal Reserve Bank and others to see to it that loans are made available on reasonable terms that help workers acquire capital.  [Limited access to capital credit] is why capital ownership in the United States has been concentrated to the point that about 95% of all [individually-]held stock is owned by about 15% of our people and very little is held by anyone else.   [Talk on April 17, 1982 at John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.]

Long, Senator Russell B.  There are but three political-economic roads from which we can choose…. We could take the first course and further exacerbate the already concentrated ownership of productive capital in the American economy. Or we could join the rest of the world by taking the second path, that of nationalization. Or we can take the third road, establishing policies to diffuse capital ownership broadly, so that many individuals, particularly workers, can participate as owners of industrial capital.… The choice is ours. There is no way to avoid this decision. Non-action is a political decision in favor of continued, and indeed increased, concentrated ownership of productive capital.  [Debates on converting the eastern rail system into an employee-owned company, December 11, 1972.]

Long, Senator Russell B.  Bring on those tired, labor-plagued, competition-weary companies and ESOP will breathe new life into them. They will find ESOP better than Geritol. It will revitalize what is wrong with capitalism. It will increase productivity. It will improve labor relations. It will promote economic justice. It will save the economic system. It will make our form of government and our concept of freedom prevail over those who don’t agree with us.  [October 20, 1975.]

Louis of Granada, Venerable.  Two things, Christian reader, particularly excite the will of man to good. A principle of justice is one, the other the profit we may derive therefrom. All wise men, therefore, agree that justice and profit are the two most powerful inducements to move our wills to any undertaking. Now, though men seek profit more frequently than justice, yet justice is in itself more powerful; for, as Aristotle teaches, no worldly advantage can equal the excellence of virtue, nor is any loss so great that a wise man should not suffer it rather than yield to vice.  [The Sinner’s Guide (1556).]

Louis, Joe.  I don’t like money actually, but it quiets my nerves.

Lowy, Walter H.  Your market has a free choice, and only be supplying what the market wants, and not by your efforts to impose your merchandise, will you get your maximum share of the market’s potential.

Lucan (Marcus Annæus Lucanus, AD 39-65).  As far as the earth is from the stars, and fire from the sea, so is the useful from the right. Power over men perishes completely if justice begins to be observed, and respect for individual rights overcomes strongholds. (Sidera terra ut distant et flamma mari, sic utile recto. Sceptrorum vis tota perit, si pendere iusta incipit, evertitque arces respectus honesti.)  [Pharsalia, VIII, 487.]

Lucan (Marcus Annæus Lucanus, AD 39-65).  Let him leave the imperial court, who wishes to be virtuous. Virtue and absolute power cannot coexist. (Exeat aula, qui vult esse pius. Virtus et summa potestas non cœunt.)  [Pharsalia, VIII, 493.]

MacArthur, General Douglas.  The hated system of land tenure, so contributory to general unrest in Asia, has been abolished. Every farmer is now accorded the right and dignity of ownership of the land he long has tilled.

He thus reaps the full fruits which result from his toil and labors with the incentive of free enterprise to maximize his effort to achieve increasing production. Representing over a half of Japan’s total population, the agriculture workers have become an invincible barrier against the advance of socialistic ideas which would relegate all to the indignity of state servitude.  [Address at Cleveland, Ohio, September 6, 1951.]

Machiavelli, Niccolò.  There is no more delicate matter to take in hand, nor more dangerous to conduct, nor more doubtful of success, than to step up as a leader in the introduction of changes.

For he who innovates will have for his enemies all those who are well off under the existing order of things and will have only lukewarm support from those who might be better off under the new order.  [The Prince and the Discourses, 1513, N. H. Thomson, translator, Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1992, page 13.  Originally published by P. F. Collier & Son, New York, 1910.]

Machiavelli, Niccolò.  We must bear in mind, then, that there is nothing more difficult and dangerous, or more doubtful of success, than an attempt to introduce a new order of things in any state.  For the innovator has for enemies all those who derived advantages from the old order of things, whilst those who expect to be benefited by the new institutions will be but lukewarm defenders.  This indifference arises in part from fear of their adversaries who were favoured by the existing laws, and partly from the incredulity of men who have no faith in anything new that is not the result of well-established experience.  Hence it is that, whenever the opponents of the new order of things have the opportunity to attack it, they will do it with the zeal of partisans, whilst the others defend it but feebly, so that it is dangerous to rely upon the latter.  [The Prince and the Discourses, Chapter 6, 1513, http://www.bibliomania.com.]

MacLeod, Henry Dunning  “Money and Credit are essentially of the same nature; Money being only the highest and most general form of Credit.”   [The Theory of Credit. Longmans, Green and Co., 1894, p. 82.]

MacLeish, Archibald.  What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.  [A Declaration of Freedom.]

Madden, Carl (Chief Economist, U.S. Chamber of Commerce).  I think some economists such as Milton Friedman have given too short a shrift to the Kelso plan. It’s an example of one means of accomplishing a broadening of wealth ownership…a quiet evolution in wealth ownership rather than the unquiet revolutions wealth owners have faced too often in the past.

Madden, Carl.  Economic theory, like theology, is sadly in need of reconstruction in recognition of the discoveries of modern science…your views and [expanded ownership] proposals illuminated a path by means of which our society could escape its 19th century preoccupation with conflict, and I surely hope that more businessmen come to understand your position.  [Chief Economist, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Letter to Norman G. Kurland, May 7, 1971.]

Madison, James.  Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths….

A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect and promises the cure for which we are seeking.  [The Federalist Papers, No. 10, p. 81.]

Madison, James.  From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and a division of the society into different interests and parties.  [The Federalist Papers, No. 10.]

Madison, James.  Government is instituted to protect property of every sort….This being the end of government, that alone is not a just government,…nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest.  [The Complete Madison, Saul K. Padover, ed., New York: Harper & Bros., 1953, p. 267.]

Madison, James.  If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.  [The Federalist Papers, No. 51.]

Madison, James.  It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known and less fixed?  [The Federalist Papers, No. 62. p. 381.]

Madison, James. Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it is obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.  [The Federalist, No. 43.]

Madison, James. The Freeholders of the country would be the safest depositories of Republican liberty. In future times a great majority of the people will not only be without landed, but with any other sort of property. These will either combine under the influence of their common situation; in which case the rights of property and the public liberty will not be secure in their hands, or, which is more probable, they will become the tools of opulence and ambition; in which case there will be equal danger on another side.  [The Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, Gaillard Hunt and J. B. Scott, eds., International Edition, 1920.]

Madison, James. The most common and durable source of faction has been the various and unequal distribution of property.  [The Federalist, No. 10.]

Madison, James. The most common and durable source of faction has been the various and unequal distribution of property.   [The Federalist, No. 10.]

Madison, James. The truth is that all men having power ought to be distrusted.

Madison, James.  Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.  [The Federalist Papers, No. 10.]

Madison, James.  It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The freeman of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents.  They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. . .  .The people have an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform or change their government whenever it be found adverse or inadequate to the purpose of its institution.

Madison, James.  Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. The Federalist Papers, No. 10.

Madison, James.  We are free today substantially, but the day will come when our Republic will be an impossibility. It will be an impossibility because wealth will be concentrated in the hands of a few. A Republic cannot stand upon bayonets, and when the day comes when the wealth of the nation will be in the hands of a few, then we must rely upon the wisdom of the best elements in the country to readjust the laws of the nations to the changed conditions.

Madison, James.  This term [property] in its particular application means “that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual.”  In its larger and juster meaning, it embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to every one else the like advantage. In the former sense, a man’s land, or merchandise, or money is called his property. In the latter sense, a man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them. He has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them.

He has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person. He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them. In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.  [March 29, 1792.]

Magna Carta.  To none will we sell, to none deny or delay, right or justice.  [On the wall of the Newseum, Washington, DC.]

Maimonides, Moses.  Lastly, the eighth, and the most meritorious of all, is to anticipate charity by preventing poverty; namely, to assist the reduced fellowman, either by a considerable gift, or a loan of money, or by teaching him a trade or by putting him in the way of business, so that he may earn an honest livelihood and not be forced to the dreadful alternative of holding out his hand for charity. To this Scripture alludes when it says: “And if thy brother be waxen poor and fallen in decay with thee, then thou shalt relieve him; yea, though he be a stranger or a sojourner; that he may live with thee… ”  [Matnot Aniyim, 10, 7 (the eight levels of charity).]

Maine, Henry Sumner.  [T]he movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract.  [Ancient Law (1864) 163-165.]

Malcolm X.   In Harlem, for instance, all of the stores are owned by white people, all of the buildings are owned by white people. The black people are just there — paying rent, buying the groceries; but they don’t own the stores, clothing stores, food stores, any kind of stores; don’t even own the homes that they live in. They are all owned by outsiders, and for these run-down apartment dwellings, the black man in Harlem pays more money than the man down in the rich Park Avenue section. It costs us more money to live in the slums than it costs them to live down on Park Avenue. Black people in Harlem know this, and that the white merchants charge us more money for food in Harlem — and it’s the cheap food, the worst food; we have to pay more money for it than the man has to pay for it downtown. So black people know that they’re being exploited and that their blood is being sucked and they see no way out.

When the thing is finally sparked, the white man is not there — he’s gone. The merchant is not there, the landlord is not there, the one they consider to be the enemy isn’t there. So, they knock at his property. This is what makes them knock down the store windows and set fire to things, and things of that sort. [Malcolm X Speaks, George Breitmen, ed. London: Secker & Warburg, 1966, pp. 166-167.]

Mandela, Nelson.  Hating clouds the mind. It gets in the way of strategy. Leaders cannot afford to hate.  [Quoted in 2007 New York Times interview.]

Mandela. Nelson.  It always seems impossible until it’s done.  [In “15 of Nelson Mandela’s Most Memorable Quotes”, www.buzzfeed.com]

Mandela. Nelson.  Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
[BrainyQuote.com, Xplore Inc, 2013. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/n/nelsonmand157855.html, accessed December 6, 2013. ]

Mandela, Nelson.  For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.  [In “15 of Nelson Mandela’s Most Memorable Quotes”, www.buzzfeed.com.]

Manning, Ernest C. (former head of Social Credit Party and Premier, Province of Alberta, Canada).   As industrialization increases and the impact of technology and automation becomes more pronounced, the importance of a second income derived from the individual’s investment in such progress (of machinery) will become of ever-increasing importance.  [“Widespread Share-Ownership, Bulwark Against State Socialism,” Canada Month, August 1969.]

Marx, Groucho.  Wages? You want to be wage slaves? Answer me that! Of course not. What is it that makes wage slaves? Wages! I want you to be free. Strike off your chains! Strike up the band! Strike three you’re out! Remember, there’s nothing like Liberty, except Colliers and The Saturday Evening Post. Be free, now and forever. One and individual. One for all and all for me, and tea for two and six for a quarter….  [Movie, Coconuts, 1925.]

Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick.  The theory of the Communists may be summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property.  [The Communist Manifesto, 1848, Peloquin Books, 1967, p. 96.]

Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick.  A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.  [The Communist Manifesto.]

Marx, Karl.  Capital is dead labour, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.  [Capital, p. 257.]

Mason, George.  All men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.  [“The Virginia Declaration of Rights,” Section 1, June 29, 1776, Annals of America, 2:432.]

Massachusetts Declaration of Rights.  All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness. October 25, 1780.

Mazzini.  Men of great genius and large heart sow the seeds of a new degree of progress in the world, but they bear fruit only after many years.

McDonald, William J.  The root cause of present injustices is not to be attributed to the division of goods, nor even to the inequality of the division, but rather to the fact that the mass of the people are practically bereft of ownership. Some means must be devised to admit the proletariat within the proprietary system. Widely distributed property makes for social stability. Any alternative offered lacks the moral discipline of responsible ownership. Perhaps the best summary argument for private property is the impossibility of finding any better general system to take its place.”  [McDonald, The Social Value of Property According to Saint Thomas Aquinas (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1939), pp. 184-5, paragraphs 7 and 8.]

McDonough, Ignatius, S.A.  No government agency is assigned to disseminate a knowledge of ownership and to increase the number of owners. [“Our Double Standard of Prosperity,” quoted in The Wanderer, August 20, 1992.]

McDonough, Ignatius, S.A.  Nowhere in American life is the idea of proprietorship for workers being promulgated on any large scale. None of our agencies or institutions, private or public, advocates such a step.  [“Our Double Standard of Prosperity,” quoted in The Wanderer, August 20, 1992.]

McDonough, Ignatius, S.A.  Our educational institutions do not teach the value and importance of the individual’s right to own private property, the necessity of exercising that right for his economic security, the necessity of the wide distribution of wealth for the proper functioning of democracy, the difficulties of acquiring and retaining proprietorship, its desirability, and the responsibilities accompanying it. In our classrooms no attempt is made to inculcate in the minds of students the determination to improve their status in life by becoming proprietors of some kind of productive wealth. Social studies texts assign full chapters to labor, but only a few references to ownership. Neither of the terms “ownership” or “proprietorship” is to be found in some encyclopedias. The omission of a correct and systematized treatment of the subject of ownership in our education institutions is tantamount to a taboo and contributes immensely to keeping our youth in ignorance of it.  [“Our Double Standard of Prosperity, ” quoted in The Wanderer, August 20, 1992.]

McKersie, Robert B. (Cornell University).  Profit sharing…represents the “test of the market,” and, as such, provides a flexible and accurate norm of performance. Since profit sharing involves a test of the market, rewards are only paid when they can be afforded. This is an important advantage over incentive plans that operate on the cost side of an organization.

McKissick, Floyd.  Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves only in the legal sense. Technology was the slave’s real emancipator. Technology freed the slave by transferring his toil onto the tireless backs of non-human slaves driven by water, steam, petroleum and electricity. But the Black man…has never owned, and never had a chance to own, the machine that replaced and indeed, surpassed his power to toil a thousandfold. When he lost his servitude he lost his livelihood. As Frederick Douglas said, “Emancipation made the slaves free to hunger; free to the winter and rains of heaven…free without roofs to cover them or bread to eat or land to cultivate.” For all his good intentions, Lincoln didn’t free the slaves. He fired them.… People who teach economics are mostly white, but the people who understand economics are mostly Black.… Slavery taught us WHO had the leisure, WHO had freedom, WHO had wealth. Not the slave, but the slave owner. Not the sharecropper, but the land-owner. Not the employee, but the capital owner. [Statement on 1969 founding of Soul City, North Carolina on the 160th Anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth; former President of the Congress or Racial Equality (CORE).]

McKnight, Father Albert J. (President, Southern Cooperative Development Fund and Vice Chairman of the National Cooperative Bank).  The great need of the hour is to find ways and means to effect a more equitable distribution of the wealth…. The Kelsonian plan of universal capitalism, providing a second income, hits at the root problem of our capitalistic system: the problem of distribution of wealth into the hands of the many instead of the concentration of wealth in the hands of few.  [“Rural Blacks and Cooperatives,” The American Ecclesiastical Review, March 1969.]

Mead, Margaret.   Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Melville, Herman.  They talk of the dignity of work. Bosh. The dignity is in leisure.

Metastasio.  Every noble acquisition is attended with its risks; he who fears to encounter the one must not expect to obtain the other.

Metzger, Bert L.  (President Profit Sharing Research Foundation).  In order to stop inflation, and to promote domestic economic growth, the following three-fold program, I believe, is imperative:

1) Controls on the money supply through continuing fiscal and monetary measures.

2) A massive educational and action program designed to enlist government, labor, and management collaboration to increase productivity at both the micro- and macro-economic levels.

3) Development of “noninflationary flexible reward mechanisms” for sharing the productivity gains and profit gains with all factors of production/distribution.

Well designed and communicated profit sharing programs can play a unique role in helping the United States in its present battle against inflation both as an “organizational” incentive capable of motivating everyone in the company to increase productivity and reduce costs: and as a “flexible reward mechanism” to give all factors of production/distribution the opportunity to earn “more” on a non-inflationary, as-earned, basis directly related to the enterprise’s ability-to-pay.

Micah 4:4 (New International Translation).   Every man will sit under his own vine and under his own fig tree ….

Michel, Dom Virgil, O.S.B.  It is a very fashionable and prevalent opinion today that the institution of private ownership and the thing we call capitalism not only go hand in hand but are also inseparable. Only recently a prominent writer in the American Review (October, 1935) said in effect that we should not speak of abolishing capitalism because for the average American capitalism means private ownership of the means of production. If that is true, then the strategy of former socialists and of all communists has been very successful. They have always tried to tell us that the two, capitalism and private property, are identical—not merely because they want to abolish capitalism but more especially because they want to abolish also private property. They know that they will have a better chance to succeed in this if they can make private property identical with capitalism in the minds of men. For the present, then, we must keep in mind that capitalism and the institution of private ownership as such are not at all identical.  [Christian Social Reconstruction, p. 16.]

Midkiff, Robert (President, American Trust Company of Hawaii, Inc.)  Profit sharing should be exempted from…wage-price restrictions because it is not a cost of doing business (as are pensions and other fringe benefits) but a method of distributing the results of a successful company operation, extremely useful in motivating employees towards increased productivity.

Mill, John Stuart.  A democratic constitution, not supported by democratic institutions in detail, but confined to the central government, not only is not political freedom, but often creates a spirit precisely the reverse, carrying down to the lowest grade in society the desire and ambition of political domination…. In proportion as the people are accustomed to manage their affairs by their own active intervention, instead of leaving them to the government, their desires will turn to repelling tyranny, rather than to tyrannizing: while in proportion as all ready initiative and direction resides in the government, and individuals habitually feel and act as under its perpetual tutelage, popular institutions develop in them not the desire of freedom, but an unmeasured appetite for place and power.  [Principles of Political Economy, Book V, Chapter XI, § 6.]

Mill, John Stuart.  A people among whom there is no habit of spontaneous action for a collective interest — who look habitually to their government to command or prompt them in all matters of joint concern — who expect to have everything done for them, except what can be made an affair of mere habit and routine — have their faculties only half developed; their education is defective in one of its most important branches.  [Principles of Political Economy, Book V, Chapter XI, § 6.]

Mill, John Stuart.  But though a better organization of governments would greatly diminish the force of the objection to the mere multiplication of their duties, it would still remain true that in all the more advanced communities, the great majority of things are worse done by the intervention of government, than the individuals most interested in the matter would do them, or cause them to be done, if left to themselves. The grounds of this truth are expressed with tolerable exactness in the popular dictum, that people understand their own business and their own interests better, and care for them more, than the government does, or can be expected to do. This maxim holds true throughout the greatest part of the business of life, and wherever it is true we ought to condemn every kind of government intervention that conflicts with it. The inferiority of government agency, for example, in any of the common operations of industry or commerce, is proved by the fact, that it is hardly ever able to maintain itself in equal competition with individual agency, where the individuals possess the requisite degree of industrial enterprise, and can command the necessary assemblage of means. All the facilities which a government enjoys of access to information; all the means which it possess of remunerating, and therefore of commanding, the best available talent in the market — are not an equivalent for the one great disadvantage of an inferior interest in the result.  [Principles of Political Economy, Book V, Chapter XI, § 5.]

Mill, John Stuart.  The industrial economy which divides society absolutely into two portions, the payers of wages and the receivers of them, the first counted by thousands and the last by millions, is neither fit for, nor capable of, indefinite duration: and the possibility of changing this system for one of combination without dependence, and unity of interest instead of organized hostility, depends altogether upon the future developments of the Partnership principle.  [Principles of Political Economy, Book V, Chapter IX, §5.]

Mills, Ogden L.  I believe that a wide distribution of property is the greatest safeguard of a free society, and I would like to see so wide a distribution, among so large a proportion of the families of the country, as to combine security with freedom and to fix the character of society, making it neither Communist nor Fascist, but Proprietary.  [Liberalism Fights On, New York: Macmillan, 1936, p. 156.]

Mills, Ogden L.  The distribution of the ownership of property…is the all important question.… There are many millions…that have little or no property.… It is the size of this group that constitutes the challenge to our American civilization. Theirs is the problem we must solve in our march toward that ideal state contemplated by our fathers. [Accordingly we must restore to this country a system in which] freedom will be combined with security through the distribution of the ownership of property among so large a proportion of the families of the country as to fix the character of society, making it neither Communist nor Fascist, but Proprietary.  [Address to the Women’s Republican Club of Massachusetts, May 8, 1935, New York Herald Tribune, May 9, 1935.]

Mills, Ogden L.  We must resist the creation of monopolies and encourage the growth of small independent business units. When large aggregations of capital are necessary for low-cost production we must seek the widest possible distribution of ownership accompanied by adequate safeguards for the small investor and stockholder.  [Liberalism Fights On, New York: Macmillan, 1936, p. 158.]

Mills, Ogden L.  [A] free society should be a proprietary society, in the sense of a wide diffusion of property ownership. A great majority of men and women must have a direct stake in the existing order, and a corresponding interest in its preservation. I do not mean that we should endeavor to return to the days of handicraft and of the individual artisan, as has been suggested by a number of writers. We cannot afford to sacrifice all of the immense benefits of mass production. But we must do all in our power to encourage home ownership, farm ownership and the growth of small business enterprises.  [The Seventeen Million, New York: Macmillan, 1937, p. 52.]

Mises, Ludwig von.  If history could prove and teach us anything, it would be the private ownership of the means of production as a necessary requisite of civilization and material well-being. All civilizations have up to now been based on private property. Only nations committed to the principle of private property have risen above penury and produced science, art, and literature. There is no experience to show that any other social system could provide mankind with any of the achievements of civilization. [Socialism, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1951, p. 583.]

Montaigne.  Whenever a new discovery is reported to the scientific world, they say first, “It is probably not true.” Thereafter, when the truth of the new proposition has been demonstrated beyond questions, they say, “Yes it may be true, but it is not important.” Finally, when sufficient time has elapsed to fully evidence its importance they say, “Yes, surely it is important, but it is no longer new.”

Montesquieu, Baron de la Brede et de (Charles de Secondat).  A nation may lose its liberties in a day, and not miss them for a century.  [The Spirit of Laws, xxv. c. 2.]

Montesquieu, Baron de la Brede et de (Charles de Secondat).  Democracy has two excesses to avoid: the spirit of inequality, which leads to an aristocracy, or to the government of a single individual; and the spirit of extreme equality, which conducts it to despotism, as the despotism of a single individual finishes by conquest.  [The Spirit of Laws, viii. c. 2.]

Montesquieu, Baron de la Brede et de (Charles de Secondat).  Experience constantly proves that every man who has power is impelled to abuse it. [The Spirit of Laws, xi, c. 4.]

Montesquieu, Baron de la Brede et de (Charles de Secondat).  In the state of nature, indeed, all men are born equal, but they cannot continue in this equality. Society makes them lose it, and they recover it only by the protection of the laws.  [The Spirit of Laws, xxi. c. 2.]

Montesquieu, Baron de la Brede et de (Charles de Secondat).  Power should be a check to power.  [The Spirit of Laws, xxv. c. 2.]

Montesquieu, Baron de la Brede et de (Charles de Secondat).  The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy.  [The Spirit of Laws, xxv. c. 2.]

Montesquieu, Baron de la Brede et de (Charles de Secondat). We ought to be very cautious and circumspect in the prosecution of magic and heresy. The attempt to put down these two crimes may be extremely perilous to liberty. [The Spirit of Laws, xii, c. 5.]

Montesquieu, Baron de la Brede et de (Charles de Secondat).  Republics come to an end by luxurious habits; monarchies by poverty.  [The Spirit of Laws, vii, c. 4.]

More, St. Thomas.  Howbeit, this one thing, son, I assure you on my faith, that if the parties will at hands call for justice, then, all were it my father stood on the one side, and the devil on the other, his cause being good, the devil should have right. [To a son-in-law, reported by Nicholas Harpsfield in his The Life and Death of Sir Thomas More, Knight, Sometime Lord High Chancellor of England, Written in the Time of Queen Mary by Nicholas Harpsfield, in Roper & Harpsfield, Live of Saint Thomas More. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1969, p. 83.]

Morgan, James A.  The great failure of the critic of culture, even when his intentions are benign, lies in his inability to recognize that the perfect world of peace, justice, equality, and environmental harmony of which he dreams — a utopia run by enlightened, sensitive, progressive (and preferably multi-degree) philosopher-kings — is a tyranny pure and simple. Philosopher-kings soon must discover a need for bureaucrats and policemen to administer and enforce their notion of the public good. They must also discover, to their chagrin, that the bureaucrats and policemen quickly will become the real power in such a society. This is precisely what happened to communism in its evolution from an intellectual, Marxist, social philosophy to a brutally anti-intellectual, Leninist, political system.  [“Critics of Culture” (commentary), Fidelity Magazine, March 1995, p. 14.]

Morgan, Lewis Henry.  A critical knowledge of the evolution of the idea of property would embody, in some respects, the most remarkable portion of the mental history of mankind.  [Ancient Society. Palo Alto, California: New York Labor News, 1978, p. 6. (Reprint of 1877 edition).]

Morgan, Lewis Henry.  Centralize property in the hands of a few and the millions are under bondage to property — a bondage as absolute and deplorable as if their limbs were covered with manacles. Abstract all property from the hands of labor and you thereby reduce labor to dependence; and that dependence becomes as complete a servitude as the master could fix upon his slave.  [Lecture, Diffusion Against Centralization,1852.]

Morgan, Lewis Henry.  The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim, because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending.  [Ancient Society.]

Morgan, Lewis Henry.  The growth of property and the desire for its transmission to children was, in reality, the moving power which brought in monogamy to insure legitimate heirs, and to limit their number to the actual progeny of the married pair.  [Ancient Society, or, Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery, Through Barbarism to Civilization, Palo Alto, California: New York Labor News, 1978 (Reprint of 1877 edition), p. 477.]

Morgan, Lewis Henry.  The time will come when human intelligence will rise to the mastery of property.  [Ancient Society.]

Morley, Felix.  Free enterprise is a natural result of the American form of government, which says in so many words that the more men do for themselves, the less government does for them, the better off we will all be.

Morley, Raymond.  The antithesis of democracy is class dictatorship, whether by groups of bankers, investors, managers, politicians, lawyers or union members. Over a considerable part of the world the unspeakable doctrine is being preached that the ideal of a democratic State is a snare and a delusion. A politician if he denies the existence of the essentials of democracy and denies it in such a way as to create class feeling, is not working in the interest of democracy even though he protests to the high heavens that that is his objective.

Morris, Gouverneur.  Nine-tenths of the people are at present freeholders…. The time is not distant when this country will abound with mechanics and manufacturers who will receive their bread from their employers. Will such men be the secure and faithful guardians of liberty? Give the votes to people who have no property, and they will sell them to the rich who will be able to buy them.  [Speech, August 7, 1787.]

Morris, William.  When Socialism comes, it may be in such a form that we won’t like it.

Charles Morrison (19th century political economist).  Even if it were in the power of the employers to make a large addition to the rates of wages which they at present pay, it is very questionable whether any real good would result from their doing so. A considerable augmentation of the incomes of the working class is indeed very greatly to be desired if it proceeds from the limitation of their numbers, and increased efficiency of their labor. But where wages are kept at a low rate by their improvidence, or inferior qualities as workmen, any increase in their incomes, effected without merit on their part, is very likely to aggravate their improvidence, and perpetuate their inefficiency.  [An Essay on the Relations Between Labour and Capital, 1854.]

Charles Morrison.  The co-operative principle presents this advantage, that the participation of the workmen in profits tends to give them a motive for working with industry, and using their intelligence as well as their manual labor in promoting the improvement of the business. Each working man will have an interest in doing his own duty, and in seeing that every other workman does the same. In this way the men will have a motive for exercising a superintendence over one another; and a public opinion is likely to be created among the whole body in favour of diligence and good conduct. Another advantage which may be expected, is, that the community of interest which will exist to a certain degree in a co operative association between capitalists and men, and in a more complete manner in an association of workmen alone, will tend to prevent or soften collisions and obstructions to the progress of the business, arising from the pretensions or passions of any of the parties concerned.  [Ibid., “On Cooperation,” Chapter 11.]

Morrison, Roy.  “Consensus” does not imply that everyone agrees, or that there is no hierarchical organization of division of responsibility. Rather, in operation it means that after thorough discussion people will agree to support the group’s decision. Consensus rests upon the belief that each person possesses some part to the truth, that each person’s concerns will be heard and considered, and that a proposal can be modified. In this way, hard decisions can be made, and the bonds of community can be maintained and strengthened.  [We Build the Road as We Travel, 1991, p. 73.]

Moskowitz, Milton Louis O. Kelso is an economic seer whose time may have come.  [San Francisco Chronicle, May 24, 1975.]

Moulton, Harold G.  It has been assumed in economic literature that the greater the volume of individual money savings the greater would be the supply of new capital goods automatically resulting therefrom. The truth of the matter is, however, that if all individuals should reduce their consumption, say, by 25 per cent, with a view to expanding the supply of funds in the investment market available for new capital construction, the curtailment of consumption involved would blot out the potential demand for the goods which might be produced by the new capital. The facts of industrial history show conclusively that the only period when new capital goods increase rapidly is during a period when consumption is also rapidly expanding and giving rise to an effective demand for new capital.  [The Financial Organization of Society, Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1930, p. 736.]

Moulton, Harold G.  It should be borne in mind in this connection that new securities are not in the main issued through the stock exchange. The usual route is by way of investment institutions, and it is not until after they have been sold by underwriters to speculators or to ultimate investors that securities are traded in on the exchanges.”  [The Formation of Capital, Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1935, p. 105.]

Moynihan, Daniel P.  One ideological claim is that private property is theft, that the natural product of the existence of property is evil, and that private ownership therefore should not exist… .What those who feel this way don’t realize is that property is a notion that has to do with control — that property is a system for the disposal of power. The absence of property almost always means the concentration of power in the state.… So many of the new nations which were established as democracies after the second world war, during the decolonizing process, have now changed their system to state-socialism. Small elites run them, and they aren’t sharing societies. They aren’t even socialist. The power of the state has been merged with business property) and you have the greatest concentration of power that’s possible.  [Nation’s Business, February 1976.]

Moynihan, Daniel Patrick.  What those who feel this way [i.e., that private ownership is inherently evil] don’t realize is that property is a notion that has to do with control—that property is a system for the dispersal of power…. The absence of property almost invariably means the concentration of power in the state.  [Nation’s Business, February 1976, p. 22.]

Muller, Dr. Steven (President of The Johns Hopkins University).  Passion in the service of reason can lead to the utmost in human achievement. Reason in the service of passion can lead to the torment of men and women by each other.  [Quoted in a letter to the editor, The Washington Post, June 7, 1972, p. A19.]

Mumford, Lewis.  Man’s Chief purpose…is the creation and preservation of values; that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately, to the individual human life.  [Faith for Living, 1940.]

Mumford, Lewis.  The segregation of the spiritual life from the practical life is a curse that falls impartially upon both sides of our existence. A society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure, and to another all the burdens of work, dooms both classes to spiritual sterility.  [Faith for Living, 1940.]

Murray, Philip.  Deny man’s link with God and his transcendence over the merely temporal, and you forge for him the first link in the chain of servitude. You make him a mere cog…of the collectivity. [Labor Day statement, 1941.]

Nævius (Gnæus Nævius).  The gods hate unjust men. (Oderunt di homines iniuros.)  [Lycurgus 270-200 BC.]

Nash, Ogden.  One rule which woe betides the banker who fails to heed it/Never lend any money to anybody unless they don’t need it.

National Catholic Rural Conference.  We are in agreement with the desire of workers to increase their income…. However, we insist that most of the increased income should be derived from ownership of capital.… If property can confer dignity, material comfort, and security upon the few, it can do the same for the many.… We suggest that the perennial emphasis of the Church on the right of individuals to own property deserves reaffirmation at this time and that we should consider bold new steps to enable the vast majority of God’s people to become owners of property which will constitute for them a source of a second income. We maintain that this will help reduce poverty and restore human rights and dignity to millions. [Statement by the Executive Committee of the National Catholic Rural Conference, Des Moines, Iowa, June 19, 1968.]

Niebuhr, Reinhold.  Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.  [The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, 1944.]

Niebuhr, Reinhold.  His (Adam Smith’s) was a real universalism in intent. Laissez Faire was intended to establish a world community as well as a natural harmony of interests within each nation….  But the “children of darkness” were able to make good use of his creed. A dogma which was intended to guarantee the economic freedom of the individual became the “ideology” of vast corporate structures of a later period of capitalism, used by them, and still used, to prevent a proper political control of their power….

Marxism was the social creed and the social cry of those classes who knew by their miseries that the creed of the liberal optimists was s snare and a delusion…. Liberalism and Marxism share a common illusion of the “children of light.” Neither understands property as a form of power which can be used in either its individual or its social form as an instrument of particular interest against the general interest.

Liberalism makes this mistake in regard to private property and Marxism makes it in regard to socialized property…. The Marxist illusion is partly derived from a romantic conception of human nature…. It assumes that the socialization of property will eliminate human egotism…. The development of a managerial class in Russia, combing economic with political power, is an historic refutation of the Marxist theory.  [The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, 1944.]

Nixon, Richard.  Government has the responsibility to provide the climate in which Americans, all Americans, have an opportunity for good jobs; and not only for good jobs, but an opportunity if they have the ability and the desire, to be owners and managers, to have a piece of the action, because if they have a piece of the action, then they believe in the system rather than fighting against it.  [Junior Chamber of Commerce Speech, April 26, 1971.]

Nixon, Richard.  It’s long been common practice among many to draw a distinction between “human rights” and “property rights,” suggesting that the two are separate and unequal — with “property rights” second to “human rights.”

But in order to have human rights, people need property rights — and never has this been more true than in the case of the Negro today. In order to enjoy the human rights that ought to be his, he has to acquire the property rights on which to build. What do I means by property? Many things — but essentially, the economic power that comes from ownership, and the security and independence that come from economic power. Rights are never secure unless protected, and the best protection for a person’s basic rights are those he can erect himself.  [CBS Radio address, April 25, 1968.]

Nixon, Richard.  We must adopt reforms which will expand the range of opportunities for all Americans. We can fulfill the American dream only when each person has a fair chance to fulfill his own dreams. This means equal voting rights, equal employment opportunity and new opportunities for expanded ownership, because in order to be secure in their human rights, people need access to property rights. [1970 State of the Union Message to the Congress, January 22, 1970]

Nyhart, Malott W.  While in New York recently at a meeting of several hundred potential investors, I asked them all “If you have two companies to invest in and one had employee shareholders and the other did not, which one would feel would be the most secure, have less labor strife and be more motivated?” The crowd erupted with the affirmative for ESOPs. It is so simple and yet so foreign, but thanks to people like you the message is getting out.  [Letter to Norman Kurland, January 27, 1989.]

O’Rourke, Edward W. (former Bishop of Peoria and Executive Director, National Catholic Rural Life Conference). Ownership of productive property — long a basic principle of Catholic social doctrine — is more important today than ever before.

Productive property (capital) and productive human effort (labor) are the sources of all goods and services. New technology is greatly increasing the contribution of capital to production and causing a decrease in the relative contribution of labor. Many, many tasks which were once done by human hands and minds are now done rapidly and unerringly by machines. Many economists predict that the day will soon come when labor will account for a tiny fraction of production and capital will account for almost all of it.

The implications of these trends are inescapable. Unless ownership of productive property becomes more widespread, a growing number of our people will be unable to support themselves or to buy the products of our industry and agriculture. This will result in much hardship among individuals and a check upon the growth of our economy.  [Editorial, Catholic Rural Life, vol. XVI, October, 1967.]

Okun, Arthur.  The market, if it can be kept honest and competitive, does provide very strong incentives for work effort and productive contributions. In their absence, society would thrash about for alternative incentives—some unreliable, like altruism; some perilous like collective loyalty; some intolerable, like coercion or oppression.  [Equality and Efficiency: The Big Trade-Off.]

Orwell, George.  How right the working classes are in their “materialism.” How right they are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time!”  [Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War.]

Oxnam, Garfield Bromley.  I am fearful of stumbling capitalism as well as of creeping socialism. [Methodist National Convocation on Urban Life, February 20, 1958.]

Packard, Howard.  A proper profit sharing formula results in increased productivity that can pay the workers a reward that is not inflationary.

Profit sharing has been practiced by this company (popularly known as Johnson Wax) for over 50 years. Through all kinds of economic weather, it has helped greatly to promote productivity.

Paine, Thomas.  [A] body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody, ought not to be trusted by any body.   [The Rights of Man, Dolphin Books, 1961, p. 321.]

Paine, Thomas.  [T]he people of America are a people of property; almost every man is a freeholder. [Quoted in Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, p. 100.]

Patman, Wright (Chairman, U.S. Congress, House Banking and Currency Committee).   Bad as “independence” is, the main fault of the Federal Reserve System — an admirable system if conducted in the public interest — is that too much power and control rests in the hands of people whose private interests are directly affected by the Federal Reserves’ actions.  [A Primer on Money, Aug. 5, 1964, p. 2.]

Patman, Wright.   The Open Market Committee, as presently established, is plainly not in the public interest. This committee must be operated by purely public servants, representatives of the people as a whole and not any single interest group. The Open Market Committee should be abolished, and its powers transferred to the Federal Reserve Board — the present public members of the committee, with reasonably short terms of office.

Also, the Federal Advisory Committee should be enlarged and reorganized. Members should be chosen for the broadest possible representation of the public interest, their main qualification: ability.

It may seem strange, but Congress has never developed a set of goals for guiding Federal Reserve policy. In founding the System, Congress spoke about the country’s need for “an elastic currency.” Since then, Congress has passed the Full Employment Act, declaring its general intention to promote “maximum employment, production, and purchasing power.” But it has never directly counseled the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve has filled this vacuum itself. The ends its policies are intended to achieve are those chosen by the Federal Reserve — all certainly admirable, but not necessarily those which the Federal Reserve should take on itself to pursue. For example, there have been times when the Federal Reserve has restricted the money supply and raised interest rates to gain an end, which had much better been left to another Government agency or the Congress to attain. The country could have had lower interest rates without sacrificing anything else.  [A Primer on Money, supra, p. 4.]

Patman, Wright.  There are many reasons why the general public doesn’t really understand our monetary system. In the first place, money is something that people tend to get emotional about. After all, money involves, and always has involved, something closely akin to faith—which probably explains why in many past societies the money system has been in the hands of a priesthood, the subject of magical rites, and the ceremonial services of the tribe’s medicine man.  [A Primer on Money, supra, p. 27.]

Patman, Wright.  [I]n a democracy the responsibility for the Government’s economic policies, which so affect the economy, normally rests with the elected representative of the people: in our case, with the President and the Congress. If these two follow economic policies inimical to the general welfare, they are accountable to the people for their actions on election day. With Federal Reserve independence, however, a body of men exist who control one of the most powerful levers moving the economy and who are responsible to no one. If the Federal Reserve pursues a policy which Congress or the President believes not to be in the public interest, there is nothing Congress can do to reverse the policy. Nor is there anything the people can do. Such bastions of unaccountable power are undemocratic. The Federal Reserve System must be reformed, so that it is answerable to the elected representatives of the people.

Second, by tolerating an “independent” Federal Reserve, the country is in the position of having two control centers independently trying to guide the economy. The President and the Congress dispose of a major influence over the economy in their power to tax and spend — their fiscal power. The Federal Reserve is the overlord of the money supply. If these two are not steering in the same direction, they can either neutralize each other or have the economy lurching in all directions. This is not a rational system for setting economic policy. It has given us trouble in the past, as the text will establish, and will inevitably in the future.  [A Primer on Money, supra, p. 2.]

Paul VI.   If you want Peace, work for Justice. [Message of Pope Paul VI for the Celebration of the Day of Peace. Jan. 1,1972.]

Paul VI.  If the world is made to furnish each individual with the means of livelihood and the instruments for his growth and progress, each man has therefore the right to find in the world what is necessary for himself. The recent Council reminded us of this: “God intended the earth and all that it contains for the use of every human being and people. Thus, as all men follow justice and unite in charity, created goods should abound for them on a reasonable basis.” All other rights whatsoever, including those of property and of free commerce, are to be subordinated to this principle. They should not hinder but on the contrary favour its application. It is a grave and urgent social duty to redirect them to their primary finality.  [Populorum Progressio, Op. cit., §22, 1967.]

Paul VI.  Individual initiative alone and the mere free play of competition could never assure successful development. One must avoid the risk of increasing still more the wealth of the rich and the dominion of the strong, whilst leaving the poor in their misery and adding to the servitude of the oppressed. [Populorum Progressio, Section 33, 1967.]

Penn, William.  If we will not be governed by God, we must be governed by tyrants.

Pennsylvania, Constitution Article 1, Section 1.  All men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent and indefeasible rights, among which are those of enjoying and defending life and liberty, of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property and reputation, and of pursuing their own happiness.

Percy, Hon. Charles H.  Unless we increase our economy’s productivity—its vitality and competitiveness—we will face pressure for increasing controls….

T]hese are some of the dangers we face unless we get our economy in high gear — back in tough competitive shape, with high rates of investment in equipment and technology. Just as important, we need a new dedication to opening avenues for employee participation and motivation through profit-sharing and innovative programs of job enrichment.

Perloff, Dr. Harvey S. (Resources for the Future, Inc.).  I found the Kelso-Hetter book to be fascinating and full of valuable insights. Their proposals certainly deserve the most careful attention.

Persian Proverb.  Thinking well is wise; planning well, wiser; doing well wisest and best of all.

Persian proverb.  One pound of learning requires ten pounds of commonsense to apply it.

Phædrus (Iulius Phædrus].  I am served first, for my name is lion. (Ego primum tollo, nominor quoniam leo.)  [C. 15 BC—AD 45 I, Prologus, 7.]

Phædrus (Iulius Phædrus].  Often when changing rulers, Nothing is changed for the poor but a name. (In principatu commutando sæpius, nil præter domini nomen mutant pauperes.)   [C. 15 BC—AD 45 I, Prologus, 15, 1.]

Pillsbury, George S (former Chairman of the Pillsbury Company and state senator).  With the apparent expanding number of citizens at or below the poverty line and, at the same time, the incredible fortunes being established by entertainers, athletes, financiers, investors and the like, it seems to me there has never been a greater need for enabling more citizens to also have a “piece of the action.” Again, what is true in this country is equally true throughout the world.  [Letter to Norman G. Kurland, November 16, 1992.]

Pius XI.   There is an instability from which no single thing can escape, for that, precisely, is the essence of created things: they have not in themselves the reason for their own being. Thus it happens that even for the greatest things, for those that are closest to the substance of certain institutions, instability is possible, and sometimes inevitable — and it is even, in fact, commonplace.  It is precisely in those social elements which seem fundamental, and most exempt from change, such as property, capital, labor, a constant change is not only possible, but is real, and an accomplished fact.  [Speech delivered in 1926.]

Pius XI.   No vicarious charity can substitute for justice which is due as an obligation and is wrongfully denied.  [Quadragesimo Anno, § 137, 1931.]

Pius XI.  In the present state of human society, however, We deem it advisable that the wage-contract should, when possible, be modified somewhat by a contract of partnership, as is already being tried in various ways to the no small gain both of the wage-earners and of the employers. In this way wage-earners are made sharers in some sort in the ownership, or the management, or the profits. [Quadragesimo Anno, Part 4, Par. 3, 1931.]

Pius XI.  First, then, let it be considered as certain and established that neither Leo nor those theologians who have taught under the guidance and authority of the Church have ever denied or questioned the twofold character of ownership, called usually individual or social according as it regards either separate persons or the common good. For they have always unanimously maintained that nature, rather the Creator Himself, has given man the right of private ownership not only that individuals may be able to provide for themselves and their families but also that the goods which the Creator destined for the entire family of mankind may through this institution truly serve this purpose.  [Quadragesimo Anno, § 45, 1931.]

Pius XI. To each, therefore, must be given his own share of goods, and the distribution of created goods, which, as every discerning person knows, is laboring today under the gravest evils due to the huge disparity between the few exceedingly rich and the unnumbered propertyless, must be effectively called back to and brought into conformity with the norms of the common good, that is, social justice.  [Quadragesimo Anno, § 58, 1931.]

Pius XI.  It will be impossible to put these principles into practice unless the non-owning workers through industry and thrift advance to the state of possessing some little property.  [Quadragesimo Anno, § 63, 1931.]

Pius XI.   In the first place, it is obvious that not only is wealth concentrated in our times but an immense power and despotic economic dictatorship is consolidated in the hands of a few, who often are not owners but only the trustees and managing directors of invested funds which they administer according to their own arbitrary will and pleasure.  This dictatorship is being most forcibly exercised by those who, since they hold the money and completely control it, control credit also and rule the lending of money. Hence they regulate the flow, so to speak, of the life-blood whereby the entire economic system lives, and have so firmly in their grasp the soul, as it were, of economic life that no one can breathe against their will.  This concentration of power and might, the characteristic mark, as it were, of contemporary economic life, is the fruit that the unlimited freedom of struggle among competitors has of its own nature produced, and which lets only the strongest survive; and this is often the same as saying, those who fight the most violently, those who give least heed to their conscience. This accumulation of might and of power generates in turn three kinds of conflict. First, there is the struggle for economic supremacy itself; then there is the bitter fight to gain supremacy over the State in order to use in economic struggles its resources and authority; finally there is conflict between States themselves, not only because countries employ their power and shape their policies to promote every economic advantage of their citizens, but also because they seek to decide political controversies that arise among nations through the use of their economic supremacy and strength. [Quadragesimo Anno (“On the Restructuring of the Social Order”), §109.]

The ultimate consequences of the individualist spirit in economic life are those which you yourselves, Venerable Brethren and Beloved Children, see and deplore: Free competition has destroyed itself; economic dictatorship has supplanted the free market; unbridled ambition for power has likewise succeeded greed for gain; all economic life has become tragically hard, inexorable, and cruel. To these are to be added the grave evils that have resulted from an intermingling and shameful confusion of the functions and duties of public authority with those of the economic sphere — such as, one of the worst, the virtual degradation of the majesty of the State, which although it ought to sit on high like a queen and supreme arbitress, free from all partiality and intent upon the one common good and justice, is become a slave, surrendered and delivered to the passions and greed of men. And as to international relations, two different streams have issued from the one fountain-head: On the one hand, economic nationalism or even economic imperialism; on the other, a no less deadly and accursed internationalism of finance or international imperialism whose country is where profit is. [Quadragesimo Anno (“On the Restructuring of the Social Order”), §§105-109, 1931.]

Pius XI.  Man cannot be exempted from his divinely-imposed obligations toward civil society, and the representatives of authority have the right to coerce him when he refuses without reason to do his duty. Society, on the other hand, cannot defraud man of his God-granted right… Nor can society systematically void these rights by making their use impossible.  [Divini Redemptoris, Op. cit., §30, 1937.]

Pius XI.  Men will see in their king or in their rulers men like themselves perhaps unworthy or open to criticism, but they will not on that account refuse obedience if they see reflected in them the authority of Christ, God and Man. Peace and harmony, too, will result; for with the spread and the universal extension of the kingdom of Christ, men will become more and more conscious of the link that binds them together, and thus many conflicts will either be prevented entirely or at least their bitterness be diminished.  [Quas Primas (“On the Kingship of Christ”), §20, 1925.]

Pius XI.  No one can be, at the same time, a sincere Catholic and a true Socialist.  [Quadragesimo Anno. 1931.]

Pius XI.  “Religious Socialism,” “Christian Socialism,” are expressions implying a contradiction in terms.  [Quadragesimo Anno. 1931.]

Pius XII.  Always moved by religious motives, the Church has condemned the various forms of Marxist Socialism; and she condemns them today, because it is her permanent right and duty to safeguard men from currents of thought and influence that jeopardize their eternal salvation.  [Christmas Broadcast, 1942.]

Pius XII.  This organic conception of society, the only vital conception, combines a noble humanism with the genuine Christian spirit, and it bears the inscription from Holy Writ which St. Thomas has explained: “The work of justice shall be peace”; a text applicable to the life of a people whether it be considered in itself or in its relations with other nations. In this view love and justice are not contrasted as alternatives; they are united in a fruitful synthesis. Both radiate from the spirit of God, both have their place in the programme which defends the dignity of man; they complement, help, support, and animate each other: while justice prepares the way for love, love softens the rigour of justice and ennobles it: both raise up human life to an atmosphere in which, despite the failings, the obstacles, and the harshness which earthly life presents, a brotherly intercourse becomes possible.  [Christmas Broadcast, “The Rights of Man, 1942.]

Pius XII.  Therefore the dignity of the human person normally demands the right to the use of earthly goods as the natural foundation for a livelihood; and to that right corresponds the fundamental obligation to grant private property, as far as possible, to all. The positive laws regulating private property may change and may grant a more or less restricted use of it; but if such legal provisions are to contribute to the peaceful state of the community, they must save the worker, who is or will be the father of a family, from being condemned to an economic dependence or slavery irreconcilable with his rights as a person.  Whether this slavery arises from the tyranny of private capital or from the power of the State makes no difference to its effect; indeed under the oppression of a State which controls everything and regulates the whole of public and private life, which encroaches even upon the sphere of thought, conviction, and conscience, this lack of freedom may have consequences even more disastrous, as experience shows. [Christmas Broadcast, “The Rights of Man,” 1942.]

Plato.  There seem to be two causes of the deterioration of the arts…wealth…and poverty…. Wealth, I said, and poverty; the one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.  [The Republic, Book 4.]

Plutarch.  Courage and wisdom are, indeed, rarities amongst men, but of all that is good, a just man it would seem is the most scarce.  [“Flamininus,” The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Translated by John Dryden and revised by Arthur Hugh Clough. (New York: Random House, Modern Library edition, p. 457).]

Plutarch.  For the rich men without scruple drew the estate into their own hands, excluding the rightful heirs from their succession; and all the wealth being centred upon the few, the generality were poor and miserable. Honourable pursuits, for which there was no longer leisure, were neglected; the state was filled with sordid business, and with hatred and envy of the rich. There did not remain above seven hundred of the old Spartan families, of which, perhaps, one hundred might have estate in land, the rest were destitute alike of wealth and of honour, were tardy and unperforming in the defense of their country against its enemies abroad, and eagerly watched the opportunity for change and revolution at home.  [“Agis,” The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Translated by John Dryden and revised by Arthur Hugh Clough. (New York: Random House, Modern Library edition, p. 962).

Plutarch.  For there is no virtue, the honour and credit for which procures a man more odium [from the elite] than that of justice; and this, because more than any other, it acquires a man power and authority among the common people. For they only honour the valiant and admire the wise, while in addition they also love just men, and put entire trust and confidence in them. They fear the bold man, and mistrust the clever man, and moreover think them rather beholding to their natural complexion, than to any goodness of their will, for these excellences; they look upon valour as a certain natural strength of the mind, and wisdom as a constitutional acuteness; whereas a man has it in his power to be just, if he have but the will to be so, and there injustice is thought the most dishonourable, because it is least excusable.  [“Cato the Younger,” The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Translated by John Dryden and revised by Arthur Hugh Clough. (New York: Random House, Modern Library edition, p. 943).]

Plutarch.  He [Tiberias Gracchus] told them that the commanders were guilty of a ridiculous error, when, at the head of their armies, they exhorted the common soldiers to fight for their sepulchres and altars; when not any amongst so many Romans is possessed of either altar or monument, neither have they any houses of their own, or hearths of their ancestors to defend. They fought indeed and were slain, but it was to maintain the luxury and the wealth of other men. They were styled the masters of the world, but in the meantime had not one foot of ground which they could call their own. “Tiberius Gracchus,” The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Translated by John Dryden and revised by Arthur Hugh Clough. (New York: Random House, Modern Library edition, p. 999).

Plutarch. Justice makes the life of such as are in prosperity, power and authority the life of a god, and injustice turns it to that of a beast.  [“Aristides,” The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Translated by John Dryden and revised by Arthur Hugh Clough. (New York: Random House, Modern Library edition, p. 395).]

Plutarch.  Nor let us part with justice, like a cheap and common thing, for a small and trifling price.  [“The Comparison of Crassus with Nicias,” The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Translated by John Dryden and revised by Arthur Hugh Clough. (New York: Random House, Modern Library edition, p. 677).]

Plutarch.  Of the land which the Romans gained by conquest from their neighbours, part they sold publicly, and turned the remainder into common; this common land they assigned to such of the citizens as were poor and indigent, for which they were to pay only a small acknowledgment into the public treasury. But when the wealthy men began to offer larger rents, and drive the poorer people out, it was enacted by law that no person whatever should enjoy more than five hundred acres of ground. This act for some time checked the avarice of the richer, and was of great assistance to the poorer people, who retained under it their respective proportions of ground, as they had been formerly rented by them. Afterwards the rich men of the neighbourhood contrived to get these lands again into their possession, under other people’s names, and at last would not stick to claim most of them publicly in their own. The poor, who were thus deprived of their farms, were no longer either ready, as they had formerly been, to serve in war or careful in the education of their children; insomuch that in a short time there were comparatively few freemen remaining in all Italy, which swarmed with workhouses full of foreign-born slaves. These the rich men employed in cultivating their ground of which they dispossessed the citizens. [“Tiberius Gracchus,” The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Translated by John Dryden and revised by Arthur Hugh Clough. (New York: Random House, Modern Library edition, p. 997).]

Plutarch.  Rome was in the most dangerous inclination to change on account of the unequal distribution of wealth and property, those of highest rank and greatest spirit having impoverished themselves by shows, entertainments, ambition of offices, and sumptuous buildings, and the riches of the city having thus fallen into the hands of mean and low-born persons. So that there wanted but a slight impetus to set all in motion, it being in the power of every daring man to overturn a sickly commonwealth.  [“Cicero,” The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, translated by John Dryden and revised by Arthur Hugh Clough. (New York: Random House, Modern Library edition, p. 1046).]

Pulitzer, Joseph.  I will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.  [April 10, 1907.]

Pournelle, Jerry & Stirling, S. M. It’s the nature of government, to build enduring institutions, structures that stay long after their purpose is over. If you pay people to help the poor, you have people who won’t be paid if there aren’t any poor, so they’ll be sure to find some. Prince of Sparta, A Novel of Falkenberg’s Legion (New York, Baen Publishing Enterprises, 1993) p. 303.

Powell, E. Angus (President, Chesterfield Land & Timber Corporation).  I am on the Federal Reserve Board in Richmond and…have felt for many years that we must discover a more effective way of combating the cancer of inflation…. We in business had better get smart enough to come up with a plan that will strengthen free enterprise…. I am more convinced than ever that the only way to resolve some of the basic ills that have brought about two digit inflation is for business to devise new means of rewarding employees with compensation over and above regular rates of pay…. It seems to me that the concept of profit sharing as a means of extra compensation has been grossly overlooked and under publicized as an important plan of attack to bring inflation under control.

Pravda.  In those discussions there is as much of the wanderings of a madman as there is of cannibalism. [Review of The Capitalist Manifesto, March 25, 1959.]

Prentice, Perry (Time, Inc.).  Business and labor are both in the same boat and it is almost suicidal for workers to think they can prosper by making it less profitable (or completely unprofitable) to employ them. Most glaring example of this kind of suicide is the Maritime Union which was so successful in getting all the wage increases it demanded that the American flag vanished from the seven seas…. Railroad labor has been almost equally successful in pricing itself out of the market….

Admittedly these may be extreme examples of labor pricing itself out of work, but union leaders would be wise to recognize before it is too late that they are harnessing the profit motive to disemployment when they force wage increases far in excess of productivity gains….

[S]uccess will depend on the employers’ willingness to offer such generous profit sharing that every worker will realize that his own bread is richly buttered on the same side as his employer’s and will have a maximum incentive to maximize productivity and minimize waste in order to increase his own income.

Pujo, Arsene P. (Chairman, U.S. Congressional House Committee on Banking and Currency).   It appears from the evidence that where the property is not held under a voting trust and where the stock has its voting rights a small fraction is able to control a corporation if the holdings are widely scattered, and that this is due mainly to the supineness and absence of initiative of stockholders in protecting their interests.

Unlike other countries, this condition is proverbial with us. None of the witnesses called was able to name an instance in the history of the country in which the stockholders had succeeded in overthrowing an existing management in any large corporation, nor does it appear that stockholders have ever even succeeded in so far as to secure the investigation of an existing management of a corporation to ascertain whether it has been well or honestly managed.  [Report of the Committee Appointed Pursuant to House Resolutions 429 and 504 to Investigate the Concentration of Control of Money and Credit, February 28, 1913, pp. 145-146.]

Rarick, Hon. John R.  We hold that the ownership of private property is the right and privilege of every American citizen and is one of the foundation stones upon which this nation and its free enterprise system has been built and has prospered. We feel that private property rights and human rights are inseparable and indivisible. Only in those nations that guarantee the right of ownership of private property as basic and sacred under their law is there any recognition of human rights. [Congressional Record, October 15, 1968, p. E9212.]

Raskin, A. H.  Collective bargaining has become a dog chasing its own tail, with inflation eating up wage increases before workers ever get a chance to spend them. Even the union leaders who bring home the fattest contracts these days are concluding that some new stabilizing element is needed to keep the extra purchasing power from draining out of their members’ pay envelopes.[p]The welcome fruit of this discontent may be a growing concentration on wage plans geared to sharing efficiency, as measured by productivity or profits, in place of the sterile “battle for the buck.”  [Labor Editor, New York Times]

Rawls, Robert.  Contrary to the commonly accepted belief, it is the risk element in our capitalist system which produces an economy of security. Risk brings out the ingenuity and resourcefulness which insure the success of enough ventures to keep the economy growing and secure.

Raymond, Richard.  There is a conspicuous void in the arguments and the programs of the counter-culture groups of this country, in that they have produced no well-formulated economic theories…. Unfortunately and ironically, Lou Kelso, who has some very imaginative economic proposals, has been offering them for many years to the establishment, the dinosaur culture….”Two-Factor” economics or “universal capitalism” recognizes the emerging importance of technology, and accepts the diminishing necessity of human labor; it is an economic theory that is beautifully tailored to the values and beliefs of most Catalog readers and those seeking alternatives to dinosaur existence…. These proposals have been laid on presidential candidates, congressmen, newspaper publishers, leading economists, and nearly all key decision makers of the establishment over and over again….  My advice to Lou is: “Come on, Lou, grow long hair, drop all that establishment costumery, immerse yourself in the now generation, and start to work with a constituency that wants you and needs you.  [The Whole Earth Catalog, Spring 1970.]

Raymond, Richard.  Two-Factor economics recognizes the importance of technology, and accepts the diminishing necessity of human labor. It is an economic theory that is beautifully tailored to the values of beliefs of most Whole Earth Catalog readers and those seeking alternatives to dinosaur existence. [Whole Earth Catalogue, Spring, 1970.]

Reagan, Ronald.  Some years ago a top Ford official was showing the late Walter Reuther through the very automates plant in Cleveland, Ohio and he said to him jokingly, “Walter, you’ll have a hard time collecting union dues from these machines and Walter said, “you are going to have more trouble trying to sell automobiles to them.”  Both of them let it stop there.  There was a logical answer to that . . . the owners of the machines could buy automobiles and if you increase the number of owners you increase the number of consumers.

Over hundred years ago Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act.  There was wide distribution of land and they didn’t confiscate anyone’s privately owned land…. We need an industrial Homestead Act.  [Speech to Young Americans for Freedom, July 20, 1974.]

Reagan, Ronald.  I have long believed that the widespread distribution of private property ownership is essential to the preservation of individual liberty, to the strength of our competitive free enterprise economy, and to our republican form of government.… [W]e must work to create the conditions for expanding the ownership of the nation’s wealth, so that all Americans may have their fair chance to become true proprietors of their country.” [June 22,1981 letter to Delaware Governor Pierre S. duPont IV upon the signing of HB 31 to encourage the broadening of the base of capital ownership among people of the State of Delaware.]

Reagan, Ronald.  Our national task today is to restore the conditions for economic recovery, without which our prosperity and our national security cannot be assured. We must restrain the headlong growth of the Federal budget; enact multi-year across-the-board tax reductions to spur new job-creating investment and productivity; roll back the tangle of regulations which needlessly hamper enterprise; and cleave to a sound monetary policy which preserves the strength of the American dollar. But even as we act boldly to achieve these goals, we must work to create the conditions for expanding the ownership of the nation’s wealth, so that all Americans may have their fair chance to become true proprietors of their country.  [June 22,1981 letter to Delaware Governor Pierre S. duPont IV upon the signing of HB 31 to encourage the broadening of the base of capital ownership among people of the State of Delaware.]

Reagan, Ronald.  Could there be a better answer to the stupidity of Karl Marx than millions of workers individually sharing in the ownership of the means of production.  [1975 radio commentary.]

Reagan, Ronald.  I can’t help but believe that in the future we will see in the United States and throughout the Western World an increasing trend toward the next logical step, employee ownership. It is a path that befits a free people.  [Speech on Project Economic Justice, August 3, 1987.]

Reagan, Ronald.  I’ve long believed one of the mainsprings of our own liberty has been the widespread ownership of property among our people and the expectation that anyone’s child, even from the humblest of families, could grow up to own a business or corporation.  [Speech on Project Economic Justice, August 3, 1987.]

Reagan, Ronald.  Meanwhile, what about the workers in those state monopolies that are being put up for sale? I am reminded of a technique for employee ownership that has worked well for many U.S. companies. It goes by various names, but the best known is “Employee Stock Ownership Program,” or ESOP.   [Address at the Gdansk Shipyard in Poland, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, September 17, 1990.]

Reagan, Ronald.  Our economic assistance must be carefully targeted, and must make maximum use of the energy and efforts of the private sector…. Economic freedom is the world’s mightiest engine for abundance and social justice…. Developing countries need to be encouraged to experiment with a growing variety of arrangements for profit sharing and expanded capital ownership.  [Speech on foreign policy presented to the American Legion, February 22, 1983.]

Reagan, Ronald.  Our Founding Fathers well understood that concentrated power is the enemy of liberty and the rights of man. They knew that the American experiment in individual liberty, free enterprise and republican self-government could succeed only if power were widely distributed. And since in any society social and political power flow from economic power, they saw that wealth and property would have to be widely distributed among the people of the country. The truth of this insight is immediately apparent.

Could there be anything resembling a free enterprise economy, if wealth and property were concentrated in the hands of a few, while the great majority owned little more than the shirts on their backs?

Could there be anything but widespread misery, where a privileged few controlled a nation’s wealth, while millions labored for a pittance, and millions more were desperate for want of employment?

It should be clear to everyone that the nation’s steadfast policy should afford every American of working age a realistic opportunity to acquire the ownership and control of some meaningful form of property in a growing national economy.

This is not to say that the government should confiscate from the “haves” and bestow upon the “have-nots”, beyond the requirements of a compassionate welfare program to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves. Far from it. But it is to say that our duty is to foster a strong, vibrant wealth-producing economy which operates in such a way that new additions to wealth accrue to those who presently have little or no ownership stake in their country.  [From unpublished Reagan letter sent to New Orleans Times Picayune, based on note from John McClaughry, SeniorPolicy Advisor, Reagan Bush Committee, October 31, 1980.]

Reagan, Ronald.  The people of Central America — and, in a broader sense, the entire developing world — need to know first-hand that freedom and opportunity are not just for the elite, but the birthright of every citizen; that property is not just something enjoyed by a few, but can be owned by any individual who works hard and makes correct decisions; that free enterprise is not just the province of the rich, but a system of free choice in which everyone has rights, and that business, large or small, is something in which everyone can own a piece of the action.  [Speech on Project Economic Justice, August 3, 1987.]

Reagan, Ronald.  Today it is difficult to find leaders who are independent of the forces that have brought us our problems: The Congress, the bureaucracy, the lobbyists, big business, and big labor. [Quoted by Jack Kemp in The New Conservative Digest, October 1982, p. 23.]

Reddy, Dr. Raj.  Experts agree that “thinking” computers almost certainly will replace people in millions of jobs in many industries and offices. “Currently, around 25 to 28 million people are employed in manufacturing in America. I expect it to go down to less than 3 million by the year 2010,” predicts Carnegie-Mellon’s [Dr. Raj] Reddy. “So we have only 30 years to decide what those millions of people are going to be doing.” He adds that society cannot expect the slack to be taken up by jobs in the service industries, leisure, research, and white-collar work — “because even there the same revolution is coming.” Reddy worries that “no one (in power) understands what’s happening or grasps the extent of what’s coming.”  [“Artificial Intelligence,” Business Week, March 8, 1982.]

Reiman, Jeffrey.  Insofar as human beings flower on the ground of freedom, justice guards that ground. Insofar as human beings flower in the soil of community, justice tends that soil. Justice makes possible a social order that people can truly be said to share freely.   [Justice and Modern Moral Philosophy, p. 309.]

Republican National Convention Platform, 1976.  Supporting proposals to enhance the ability of our working and other citizens to own “a piece of the action” through stock ownership.”

Republican National Convention Platform, 1980.  The widespread distribution of private property ownership is the cornerstone of American liberty. Without it neither our free enterprise system nor our republican form of government could long endure.… The next Republican Administration will…not only protect the cherished human right of property ownership, but will also work to help millions of Americans — particularly those from disadvantaged groups — to share in the ownership of the wealth of their nation.

Republican Party.  The party should stand for a constantly wider diffusion of property. That is the greatest social and economic security that can come to free men. It makes men free.  [“Where the Republican Party Should Stand, from An American Platform, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, May 14, 1936.]

Republican Party.  The widespread distribution of private property ownership is the cornerstone of American liberty.  Without it, neither our free enterprise system nor our republican form of government could long endure.  [Platform, 1980 Republican National Convention, Detroit, July 14, 1980.]

Reuther, Walter P. (President, United Auto Workers).  If you look at the income distribution, you see that it is being distorted very dangerously. This is not just a matter of economic justice.  The economy won’t work, it will break down, if we don’t find a more equitable way to share the abundance of our new technology.   [Testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, February 20, 1967.]

Reuther, Walter P. (President, United Auto Workers).   The breakdown in collective bargaining in recent years is due to the difficulty of labor and management trying to equate the relative equity of the worker and the stockholder and the consumer in advance of the facts….  If the workers get too much, then the argument is that that triggers inflationary pressures, and the counter argument is that if they don’t get their equity, then we have a recession because of inadequate purchasing power. We believe this approach (progress sharing) is a rational approach because you cooperate in creating the abundance that makes the progress possible, and then you share that progress after the fact, and not before the fact.  Profit sharing would resolve the conflict between management apprehensions and worker expectations on the basis of solid economic facts as they materialize rather than on the basis of speculation as to what the future might hold…. If the workers had definite assurance of equitable shares in the profits of the corporations that employ them, they would see less need to seek an equitable balance between their gains and soaring profits through augmented increases in basic wage rates. This would be a desirable result from the standpoint of stabilization policy because profit sharing does not increase costs. Since profits are a residual, after all costs have been met, and since their size is not determinable until after customers have paid the prices charged for the firm’s products, profit sharing as such cannot be said to have any inflationary impact upon costs and prices…. Profit sharing in the form of stock distributions to workers would help to democratize the ownership of America’s vast corporate wealth.  [Testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, February 20, 1967.]

Reuther, Walter P. (President, United Auto Workers).  Profit sharing in the form of stock distributions to workers would help to democratize the ownership of America’s vast corporate wealth which is today appallingly undemocratic and unhealthy.  The Federal Reserve Board recently published data from which it is possible to estimate the degree of concentration in the ownership of publicly traded stock held by individuals and families as of December 1962. Preliminary analysis of these data indicates that, despite all the talk of a “people’s capitalism” in the United States, little more than one percent of all consumer units owned approximately 70 percent of all such stock.  Fewer than 8 percent of all consumer units owned approximately 97 percent—which means, conversely, that the total direct ownership interest of more than 92 percent of America’s consumer units in the corporation-operated productive wealth of this country was approximately 3 percent.  Profit sharing in a form that would help to correct this shocking maldistribution would be highly desirable for that reason alone.… If workers had definite assurance of equitable shares in the profits of the corporations that employ them, they would see less need to seek an equitable balance between their gains and soaring profits through augmented increases in basic wage rates. This would be a desirable result from the standpoint of stabilization policy because profit sharing does not increase costs. Since profits are a residual, after all costs have been met, and since their size is not determinable until after customers have paid the prices charged for the firm’s products, profit sharing as such cannot be said to have any inflationary impact upon costs and prices. [Testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress on the President’s Economic Report, February 20, 1967.]

Riblet, Carl.  Napoleon’s insight in describing the function of economists: who are he said, blockheads who make financial plasters to stop the running sores of the body politic.

Ricardo, David.  Labour, like all other things which are purchased and sold…has its natural and its market price.  [Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.]

Ricardo, David.  The natural price of labour is that price which is necessary to enable the labourers, one with another, to subsist and to perpetuate the race, without either increase or diminution.  [Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.]

Ricardo, David.  Like all other contracts, wages should be left to the fair and free competition of the market and should never be controlled by the interference of the legislature.  [Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.]

Ricardo, David.  The last point for consideration is the supposed disposition of the people to interfere with the rights of property. So essential does it appear to me, to the cause of good government, that the rights of property should be held sacred, that I would agree to deprive those of the elective franchise against whom it could justly be alleged that they considered it their interest to invade them. [“Observations on Parliamentary Reform,” The Scotsman, April 24, 1824.]

Rice, E. W. A lie has always a certain amount of weight with those who wish to believe it.

Rockefeller, John D. III.  Taxation has its limitations as a method of achieving better economic distribution since for this purpose it is essentially remedial. We must also take a positive approach by finding new ways to spread ownership of future capital growth more broadly in our society.  [The Second American Revolution, 1976.]

Rockefeller, John D. III.  [M]any of the deficiencies of our economic system could be alleviated if ways were found to broaden the ownership of the means of production.…This has happened in some companies [through ESOPs]. Successful approaches of this sort would pay dividends in terms of employee commitment and morale. And they would not deprive anyone of his present holdings since they are based on future growth.  [The Second American Revolution, 1976.]

Rogers, Will.  There have been three great inventions since the beginning of time: fire, the wheel, and central banking.

Rommen, Heinrich (on Power).  Wherever men live and work together there arises the problem of power.  Though it is a wholesome thing to channel the use of that power by the imposition of legal rules and of formalized proceedings and standards, what is decisive is the moral restriction, that restriction and responsibility which make power and powerholder alike subject to the end of the organization, the common good.  This philosophical teleology of power becomes moral restriction and is stronger than the finesses of legalist proceedings, which are, as history shows, only a weak element of resistance against the temptation to abuse of power.  The modern Caesarian tyranny, resting on the principle of popular sovereignty, even general franchise, shows this distinctly.  [“The Weakening of Social Ethics” The State in Catholic Thought, II.xii.vi, p. 296.]

Rommen, Heinrich (On Property).  “Thou shalt not steal” presupposes the institution of private property as pertaining to the natural law; but not, for example, the feudal property arrangements of the Middle Ages or the modern capitalist system. Since the natural law lays down general norms only, it is the function of the positive law to undertake the concrete, detailed regulation of real and personal property and to prescribe the formalities for conveyance of ownership.  [The Natural Law, A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy. Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, Inc., 1998, p. 59.]

Rommen, Heinrich (on Private Property, Freedom and Natural Law).  Liberty is closely connected with property; this is true philosophically, not only in our bills of rights.  It is common theory that the idea of property follows immediately from the idea of person.  It is philosophically a necessary consequence of it.  The right to property is simply an enlargement of the person, and the right of liberty is realized in the right of property.  Therefore the institution of property, the suum as related to things, is presupposed by the legal order.  The bills of rights do not create it, even as they are not competent to destroy it.  The institution of property is like a dowry of the personality.  Today this truth is easily proved.  Where the institution of property is completely abolished, as in Soviet Russia, man has ceased to be a person and has become a mere tool of the superstate, a mere cog in a non-personal machine.  Rightly, therefore, Leo XIII (Rerum Novarum) speaks of a slavish yoke that has been imposed on the propertyless modern proletarian. (1)

It is morally impossible to exist as a free person without property.  The sphere of freedom increases directly with the sphere of property, or contrariwise, as Linsenmann (2) so ably put it, the man who has no property easily becomes himself the property of another man. (3)  It is, therefore, a conclusion from the principle of natural law that the institution of property ought to exist.  The positive legal order guarantees the pre-existent right to property; it may regulate the use of property; it may constitute certain things to be public property, and so on.  The capitalist and the feudalist property orders are but transitory; the institution of property is perennial.  We may thus see that there exists a perennial kernel in the concept of suum which precedes its concrete determination in positive law. [“Natural Rights of the Person and of the State”, The State in Catholic Thought, St. Louis, Missouri:  B. Herder Book Company, 1947, I.vii.ii, pp. 188-189.]

Rommen, Heinrich.  There is no evasion of this moral responsibility of all the nations and especially of the most powerful nations for that peace and justice which, together with the security of one’s own nation, is the object of foreign policy.  Too many people who eagerly draw up perfect blueprints for world organization are secretly influenced by the expectation that after the establishment of such legal institutions they will get rid of the continuous responsibility of a burdensome foreign policy.  They have fallen into the same fallacy as the classical liberal economists, namely, that if a certain set of legal institutions should be introduced, then out of the individuals’ efforts to pursue their unrestricted self-interest the social harmony would automatically ensue.  The result was, of course, not social harmony but the power struggle of collective interests, class struggles, and the like.  If in the national order the merely legalistic concept of the state according to the liberal pattern is impossible, a complete juridification of the international order will be even less possible.  [On World Peace, Justice and Charity.]

Rommen, Heinrich.  Too many of the planners, moreover, have an optimistic though mechanistic psychology according to which man is the creature of his institutional environment, that is, he is a bundle of causal reactions to the primary acting environmental and objective institutional factors.  But this psychology of determinism forgets that man is conditioned and motivated, but not causally determined, by these institutional factors.  There remains a residual sphere beyond all causal determinations, where man is morally free and can become truly culpable, not innocently guilty as in the ancient tragedy. [Sophocles’ “Oedipus Trilogy”]  Sometimes this over-all juridification is caused by a tacit rejection of man’s moral nature.  And contradictions appear, such as this, that Hitler is wholly explained causally as the effect of causes that are sociological, institutional, and so on, and yet considered personally and morally guilty.

Politics is an integral part of ethics, as is law.  Arbitrary power must be controlled by positive law.  But, that law may be enabled to do so, it must itself be backed by power responsible to the moral ideas, to the national common good.  The strife among nations can be best settled if the universal law of morality, the principles of natural law as the unwritten constitution of the international community, are commonly accepted.  For then power is put in the service of the fundamental moral ideas.  And there is no evasion of the principle that the greater the power, influence, and prestige of a nation, the greater is its responsibility for peace and justice.  Moreover, the less can this responsibility be shifted to any legal institution, however abstractly perfect, and the nation still hope to return securely to a splendid isolation and to the sole pursuit of its own national happiness.  On the other hand, only after the powerful nations are ready to accept in mutual understanding their direct and inseparable responsibility for peace, only then will the legal institution work.  But just as important is the perpetual will to establish justice, that is, to work for changes of the actual status quo when it has become an obviously unjust status, the continuation of which would endanger the peace of the world.  Peace is the work of justice.  Hence it will always be this moral will to justice that gives the legal institutions power.  Without this moral will and concordant responsibility, the institutions will be empty hulks, a derision of the idea of law.  Though peace, the tranquility of the order, is the work of justice, justice itself ought to be vivified by charity, based on the common brotherhood of men and on the common fatherhood of God.  These three — charity vivifying justice, justice working peace, and peace being tranquility of the order — by permeating and inspiring the legal institutions, are the real guaranty for the peace of the world.
[“World Peace”, The State in Catholic Thought, IV.xxxii.vii.]

Roosevelt, Eleanor.  America is not a pile of goods, more luxury, more comforts, a better telephone system, a greater number of cars. America is a dream of greater justice and opportunity for the average man and, if we can not obtain it, all our other achievements amount to nothing. [Syndicated newspaper column, 1/6/41.]

Roosevelt, Eleanor. The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano.  Let us not confuse objectives with methods.  Too many so-called leaders of the nation fail to see the forest because of the trees.  Too many of them fail to recognize the vital necessity of planning for definite objectives.  True leadership calls for the setting forth of the objectives and the rallying of public opinion in support of these objectives.

Do not confuse objectives with methods.  When the nation becomes substantially united in favor of planning the broad objectives of civilization, then true leadership must unite thought behind definite methods.

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation.  It is common sense to take a method and try it:  If it fails, admit it frankly and try another.  But above all, try something.  The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach.

We need enthusiasm, imagination and the ability to face facts, even unpleasant ones, bravely.  We need to correct, by drastic means if necessary, the faults in our economic system from which we now suffer.  We need the courage of the young.  Yours is not the task of making your way in the world, but the task of remaking the world which you will find before you.  May every one of us be granted the courage, the faith and the vision to give the best that is in us to that remaking!  [Commencement speech at Oglethorpe University, May 22, 1932.]

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano.  The “four essential human freedoms”: “freedom of speech and expression”….”freedom of worship”….”freedom from want”….”freedom from fear.” [State of the Union address, 1/6/41.]

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano.  True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. [“Economic Bill of Rights,” 1944.]

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano. A program whose basic thesis is, not that the system of free enterprise for profit has failed in this generation, but that it has not yet been tried!

Roosevelt, Theodore.  The good citizen will demand liberty for himself, and as a matter of pride he will see to it that others receive the liberty which he thus claims as his own. Probably the best test of true love of liberty in any country is the way in which minorities are treated in that country. Not only should there be complete liberty in matters of religion and opinion, but complete liberty for each man to lead his life as he desires, provided only that in so doing he does not wrong his neighbor….

In every civilized society property rights must be carefully safeguarded; ordinarily, and in the great majority of cases, human rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict between them, human rights must have the upper hand, for property belongs to man and not man to property….

We can just as little afford to follow the doctrinaires of an extreme individualism as the doctrinaires of an extreme socialism….

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.  [“Citizenship in a Republic,” Speech delivered at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910. History as Literature (1913).]

Roosevelt, Theodore.  Just as little can we afford to follow the doctrinaires of an impossible — and incidentally of a highly undesirable — social revolution which, in destroying individual rights — including property rights — and the family, would destroy the two chief agents in the advance of mankind, and the two chief reasons why either the advance or the preservation of mankind is worthwhile. It is an evil and a dreadful thing to be callous to sorrow and suffering and blind to our duty to do all things possible for the betterment of social conditions. But it is an unspeakably foolish thing to strive for this betterment by means so destructive that they would leave no social conditions to better. In dealing with all these social problems, with the intimate relations of the family, with wealth in private use and business use, with labor, with poverty, the one prime necessity is to remember that, though hardness of heart is a great evil, it is no greater an evil than softness of head.  [“Biological Analogies in History,” History as Literature, 1913.]

Roosevelt, Theodore.  The best lesson that any people can learn is that there is no patent cure-all which will make the body politic perfect, and that any man who is able glibly to answer every question as to how to deal with the evils of the body politic is at best a foolish visionary and at worst an evil-minded quack. Neither doctrinaire socialism nor unrestricted individualism nor any other ism will bring about the millennium. Collectivism and individualism must be used as supplementary, not as antagonistic, philosophies. In the last analysis the welfare of a nation depends on its having throughout a healthy development. A healthy social system must of necessity represent the sum of very many moral, intellectual, and economic forces, and each such force must depend in its turn partly upon the whole system; and all these many forces are needed to develop a high grade of character in the individual men and women who make up the nation.

Much of the discussion about socialism and individualism is entirely pointless, because of failure to agree on terminology.

The very reason why we object to state ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the nation as an antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism.  [“The Thralldom of Names,” History as Literature.]

Roosevelt, Theodore.  It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best laws, but it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws.

Roosevelt, Theodore.  What counts in a man or in a nation is not what the man or the nation can do, but what he or it actually does.  [“Productive Scholarship,” History as Literature, 1913.]

Roosevelt, Theodore.  There is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition in theology, and it is all the more dangerous because those suffering from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from all su]perstition.  [“The Search for Truth in a Reverent Spirit,” History as Literature, 1913.

Rothschild, Mayer Anselm.  Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws. (Frederick Merton, The Rothschilds, A Family Portrait, New York: Atheneum, 1962.

Russell, Bertrand.  Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.  [“In Praise of Idleness,” In Praise of Idleness: And Other Essays, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972, p. 14.]

Russell, Bertrand.  The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education. “In Praise of Idleness,” In Praise of Idleness: And Other Essays, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972, p. 19.

Russell, George W.  Those who have economic power have civil power also.  [Open letter to the Employers, Dublin Times, 1913 general strike.]

Russian proverb.  No one is ever hanged with money in his pockets.

Ryan, Monsignor John A.  A Living Wage: Its Ethical and Economic Aspects. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, Publishers, 1906, 67-68.)

The source of natural rights is the dignity of the human person, while their scope is determined by the person’s essential needs. A man’s natural rights are as many and as extensive as are the liberties, opportunities and possessions that are required for the reasonable maintenance and development of his personality. They may all be reduced to the right to a reasonable amount of external liberty of action. Some of them, for instance, the right to live and the right to marry, are original and primary, inhering in all persons of whatever condition; others are derived and secondary, occasioned and determined by the particular circumstances of particular persons. To the latter class belongs the right to a Living Wage. It is not an original and universal right; for the receiving of wages supposes that form of industrial organization known as the wage system, which has not always existed and is not essential to human welfare. Even to-day there are millions of men who get their living otherwise than by wages, and who, therefore, have no juridical title to wages of any kind or amount. The right to a Living Wage is evidently a derived right which is measured and determined by existing social and industrial institutions.

Sallust (C. Sallustius Crispus, 86—35 BC).  A good man prefers to suffer rather than overcome injustice with evil. (Bono vinci satius est quam malo more iniuriam vincere.)  [Bellum Iugurthinum, XLII, 2.]

Sallust (C. Sallustius Crispus, 86—35 BC).  The poorest of men are the most useful to those seeking power. (Homini potentiam quærente egentissumus quisque opportunissumus.)  [Bellum Iugurthinum, I, 2.]

Samora, Dr. Julian (Professor of Sociology, University of Notre Dame).  We looked at a number of plans, but most were old and conventional, including the one [the Family Assistance Program] that was chosen by the majority. A plan to which the Commission did not give due consideration is that proposed as the Second Income Plan…. Anyone seriously interest in income maintenance programs must give the Second Income Plan thorough consideration.  [Supplementary Statement to Poverty Amid Plenty: The American Paradox, Report of the President’s Commission on Income Maintenance Programs, November 12, 1969.]

Samuelson, Paul.  Kelsoism is not accepted by modern scientific economics as a valid and fruitful analysis of the distribution of income but rather it is regarded as an amateurish and cranky fad.  [The San Juan Star, April 27, 1972.]

San Francisco Examiner.  [Louis Kelso] could be to 21st Century capitalistic economics what Einstein was to 20th Century physics.  [Sunday Magazine, May 17, 1970.]

Say, Jean Baptiste.  All those who, since Adam Smith, have turned their attention to Political Economy, agree that in reality we do not buy articles of consumption with money, the circulating medium with which we pay for them. We must in the first instance have bought this money itself by the sale of our produce.

To a proprietor of a mine, the silver money is a produce with which he buys what he has occasion for. To all those through whose hands this silver afterwards passes, it is only the price of the produce which they themselves have raised by means of their property in land, their capitals, or their industry. In selling them they in the first place exchange them for money, and afterwards they exchange the money for articles of consumption. It is therefore really and absolutely with their produce that they make their purchases: therefore it is impossible for them to purchase any articles whatever, to a greater amount than those they have produced, either by themselves or through the means of their capital or their land.  [From Letters to Malthus (1821), Chapter 1, page 2.]

Say, Jean Baptiste.  To the labor of man alone he (Smith) ascribes the power of producing values.  This is an error.  A more exact analysis demonstrates…that all the values are derived from the operation of labor, or rather from the industry of man, combined with the operation of those agents which nature and capital furnish him.  Dr. Smith did not, therefore, obtain a thorough knowledge of the most important phenomenon in production; this has led him into erroneous conclusions, such, for instance, as attributing a gigantic influence to the division of labor, or rather to the separation of employments.  This influence, however, is by no means inappreciable or even inconsiderable; but the greatest wonders of this description are not so much owing to any peculiar property in human labor, as to the use we make of the powers of nature.  His ignorance of this principle precluded him from establishing the true theory of machinery in relation to the production of wealth (italics supplied).  [Say’s critique of Smith and labor theory of value in J.B. Say, A Treatise on Political Economy (1830) 6th American edition, pp. xl-xli.  Cited in Robert Ashford and Rodney Shakespeare, Binary Economics: The New Paradigm (University Press of America, 1999), pp.100-101.]

Schumpeter, Joseph A.  [T]he very foundation of private property and free contracting wears away in a nation in which its most vital, most concrete, most meaningful types [of private property and free contracting] disappear from the moral horizon of the people.  [Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.]

Schumpeter, Joseph A.   [T]here is another method of obtaining money.… [It] does not presuppose the existence of accumulated results of previous development, and hence may be considered as the only one which is available in strict logic. This method of obtaining money is the creation of purchasing power by banks. The form it takes is immaterial. The issue of banknotes not fully covered by specie withdrawn from circulation is an obvious instance, but methods of deposit banking render the same service, where they increase the sum total of possible expenditure. Or we may think of bank acceptances in so far as they serve as money to make payments in wholesale trade. It is always a question, not of transforming purchasing power which already exists in someone’s possession, but of the creation of new purchasing power out of nothing — out of nothing even if the credit contract by which the new purchasing power is created is supported by securities which are not themselves circulating media — which is added to the existing circulation. And this is the source from which new combinations are often financed, and from which they would have to be financed always, if results of previous development did not actually exist at any moment.

These credit means of payment, that is means of payment which are created for the purpose and by the act of giving credit, serve just as ready money in trade, partly directly, partly because they can be converted immediately into ready money for small payments or payments to the non-banking classes — in particular to wage-earners. With their help, those who carry out new combinations can gain access to the existing stocks of productive means, or, as the case may be, enable those from whom they buy productive services to gain immediate access to the market for consumption goods. There is never, in this nexus, granting of credit in the sense that someone must wait for the equivalent of his service in goods, and content himself with a claim, thereby fulfilling a special function; not even in the sense that someone has to accumulate means of maintenance for laborers or landowners, or produced means of production, all of which would only be paid for out of the final results of production. Economically, it is true, there is an essential difference between these means of payment, if they are created for new ends, and money or other means of payment of the circular flow. The latter may be conceived on the one hand as a kind of certificate for completed production and the increase in the social product effected through it, and on the other hand as a kind of order upon, or claim to, part of this social product. The former have not the first of these two characteristics. They too are orders, for which one can immediately procure consumption goods, but not certificates for previous production. Access to the national dividend is usually to be had only on condition of some productive service previously rendered or of some product previously sold. This condition is, in this case, not yet fulfilled. It will be fulfilled only after the successful completion of the new combinations. Hence this credit will in the meantime affect the price level.

The banker, therefore, is not so much primarily a middleman in the commodity “purchasing power” as a producer of this commodity. However, since all reserve funds and savings today usually flow to him, and the total demand for free purchasing power, whether existing or to be created, concentrates on him, he has either replaced private capitalists or become their agent; he has himself become the capitalist par excellence. He stands between those who wish to form new combinations and the possessors of productive means. He is essentially a phenomenon of development, though only when no central authority directs the social process. He makes possible the carrying out of new combinations, authorizes people, in the name of society as it were, to form them. He is the ephor of the exchange economy….  [Chapter II: “The Fundamental Phenomenon of Economic Development,” The Theory of Economic Development, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1993, pp. 72-74.]

Semler, Ricardo.  It is not socialist, as some of our critics contend. It isn’t purely capitalist, either. It is a new way. A third way. A more humane, trusting, productive, exhilarating, and, in every sense, rewarding way.  [Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace, Warner Books, September 1993.]

Seneca (Lucius Annæus Seneca).  Paucos servitus, plures servitutem tenant. (“There are a few men whom slavery holds fast, but there are many more who hold fast to slavery.)  [Epistulæ Morales, II, 6.

Seneca (Lucius Annæus Seneca).   No one can hold absolute power for long, controlled power endures. (Violenta nemo imperia continuit diu, moderata durant.)  [C. 4 BC—AD 65 Troades, 258]

Seneca (Lucius Annæus Seneca).  Unjust rule does not last forever. (Iniqua numquam regna perpetuo menent.)

Sevareid, Eric (news broadcaster). It is perfectly clear that people, given no alternative, will choose tyranny over anarchy, because anarchy is the worst tyranny of all…. The special nature of liberties is that they can be defended only as long as we still have them. So the very first signs of their erosion must be resisted, whether the issue be domestic surveillance by the Army, so-called preventive detention, or the freedom of corporate television, or that of a campus newspaper…. It is an eternal error to believe that a cause considered righteous sanctifies unrighteous methods…. It is eternally true that both successful and unsuccessful revolutions increase the power of the state, not that of the individual…. We are learning that affluence without simplicity is a giant trap; that poverty itself is endurable, but not poverty side by side with affluence. Our political leaders are learning that Sophocles was right: nothing that is vast enters into the affairs of mortals without a curse, and that vast American power has now produced its curse…. What counts most in the long haul of adult life is not brilliance, or charisma, or derring-do, but rather the quality that the Romans called “gravitas” — patience, stamina, and weight of judgment…. The prime virtue is courage, because it makes all other virtues possible.  [Highlights from the speech made by Eric Sevareid, CBS chief Washington correspondent, at the 80th Annual Stanford University Commencement, June 13, 1971.]

Shabbat 63a.  Greater is he who lends than he who gives, and greater still is he who lends, and with the loan, helps the poor man to help himself.  [Quoted in The Way of the Upright: A Jewish View of Economic Justice, Rabbi Richard Hirsh, 1973, p. 106.]

Shaw, George Bernard.   We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it, than to consume wealth without producing it.

Sheen, Fulton J.  As long as the decent people refuse to believe that morality must manifest itself in every sphere of human activity, including the political, they will not meet the challenge of Marxism. [Communism and the Conscience of the West, 1948, p. 125.]

Sheen, Fulton J.  It is the basic principle of Marxism that any attempt to reconcile capital and labor so that they both co-operate in peace and prosperity is a betrayal of communism. [Communism and the Conscience of the West, 1948, p. 12.[

Sheen, Fulton J.  One of the greatest disasters that happened to modern civilization was for democracy to inscribe “liberty” on its banners instead of “justice.” Because “liberty” was considered the ideal it was not long until some men interpreted it as meaning “freedom from justice”; then when religion and decent government attempted to bring them back to justice, organized into “freedom groups” they protested that their constitutional and natural rights were being violated.

The industrial and social injustice of our era is the tragic aftermath of democracy’s overemphasis on freedom as the “right to do whatever you please.” No, freedom means the right to do what you ought, and ought implies law, and law implies justice, and justice implies God. So too in war, a nation that fights for freedom divorced from justice has no right to war, because it does not know why it wants to be free, or why it wants anyone else to be free.  [Catholic Hour broadcast, January 5, 1941.]

Sheen, Fulton.  Men work harder and more readily when they labor on that which is their own. Communism and the Conscience of the West, 1948, p. 129.

Sheen, Fulton J.  Nothing can do men of good will more harm than apparent compromises with parties that subscribe to antimoral and antidemocratic and anti-God forces. We must have the courage to detach our support from men who are doing evil. We must bear them no hatred, but we must break with them. [Communism and the Conscience of the West, 1948, p. 126.]

Sheen, Fulton J.  The basic struggle today is not between individualism and collectivism, free enterprise and socialism, democracy and dictatorship. These are only the superficial manifestations of a deeper struggle which is moral and spiritual and involves above all else whether man shall exist for the state, or the state for man, and whether freedom is of the spirit or a concession of a materialized society. [Preface, Communism and the conscience of the West, 1948.]

Sheen, Fulton J.  There is no word more “dangerous” than liberalism, because to oppose it is the new “unforgivable sin.” The word can be used in three senses: (a) As a philosophy which believes in the progressive achievement of civil, social, political, economic and religious liberties within the framework of a moral law. (b) As an attitude which denies all standards extrinsic to man himself, measures freedom as a physical power rather than a moral power and identifies progress by the height of the pile of discarded moral and religious traditions. (c) As an ideology generally identified with the doctrine of laissez faire. The first kind of liberalism is to be encouraged, prospered and achieved. The last two are false for reasons well known to those who are familiar with Laski, Hocking, Tawney, Weber and the Papal Encyclicals.  [Communism and the Conscience of the West, Preface, 1948.]

Sheen, Fulton J.  [I]f a man surrenders all power of self-determination in regard to the profits, management or ownership of the place where he works, he not only loses that special prerogative which marks him off from a cow in a pasture, but what is worse, he loses all capacity for determining any work. This is the beginning of a slavery which sometimes goes by the name of security.  [Communism and the Conscience of the West, 1948, p. 130.]

Sheen, Fulton J.  [T]he Western world generally has lost the concept of man as a creature made to the image and likeness of God, and reduced him either to a component part of the universe, to an economic animal or to a “physiological bag filled with psychological libido.” Once man became materialized and atomized in Western thinking, it was only natural for a totalitarianism to arise to gather up the fragments into a new totality and substitute the collective man for the individual man who was isolated from all social responsibilities.  [Preface to Communism and the Conscience of the West, 1948.]

Sheen, Fulton J.  There are three ways in which a man becomes a slave. He may be born into slavery, or forced into it, or he can deliberately accept his servitude. All three forms flourish in the modern world. Men are born and forced into slavery in Russia and her satellites states. Men in the free world invite slavery when they ask the government to provide complete security, when they surrender their freedom to the  “Welfare State.”

The slave states of Western world are an outgrowth of monopolistic capitalism — an economic system which is opposed to the wide distribution of private property in many hands. Instead, monopolistic capitalism concentrates productive wealth among a few men, allowing the rest to become a vast proletariat.

Some representatives of monopolistic capitalism, sensing this evil in their system, have tried to silence criticism by pointing to the diffused ownership in the great corporations. They advertise, “No one owns more than 4 percent of the stock of this great company.” Or they print lists of stockholders, showing that these include farmers, schoolteachers, baseball players, taxi drivers, and even babies. But there is a catch to this argument, and it is this: although it is true that individuals of small means own shares in the company, it is not true that they run the company. Their responsibility for its policies is nil.

Possession properly has two faces, two aspects: we all have a right to private property, but this is accompanied by our responsibility for its righteous use. These two things (which should be inseparable) are frequently divided today. Everyone admits that the farmer who own a horse is obligated to feed and care for it, but in the case of stocks and bonds, we often forget that the same principle should prevail.

Monopolistic capitalism is to blame for this; it sunders the right to own property from responsibility that owning property involves. Those who own only a few stocks have no practical control of any industry. They vote by postcard proxy, but they have rarely even seen “their” company. The two elements which ought to be inextricably joined in any true conception of private property — ownership and responsibility — are separated. Those who own do not manage; those who manage; those who manage and work do not control or own.

The workmen in a factory may have a shadowy, unknown absentee “employer” — the thousands of individual owners of stock — whom “management” represents and tries to please by extra dividends. The workman’s livelihood is at the disposition of strangers who make a single demand of their representatives: higher profits.

Faced with such insecurity, labor unions seek a solution in demands for higher wages, shorter hours, pensions, and such things. But this approach takes monopolistic capitalism for granted, and accepts the unnatural division between property and responsibility as permanent. A much more radical solution is apt to come, and this may take either of two forms.

One way of remedying the situation would be through a profound alternative of our political and economic life, with the aim of distributing the means of production more widely by giving every workman a share in profits, management, and ownership, all three. The other alternative which is not a constructive solution is confiscation: this may take the violent form of communism, or the less noticeable form of bureaucratic encroachment through taxation, as favored by the welfare state. [and/or outright confiscation likened to General Motors, AIG, and Banks,  etc. etc. etc.] Confiscation in any form is an unhealthy solution for a real disease. It amounts to telling men that because they are economically crippled, they must abandon all efforts to get well and allow the state to provide them with free wheelchairs.

The denial of the right of ownership to a man is a denial of his basic freedom: freedom without property is always incomplete. To be “secured” — but with no accompanying responsibility – is to be the slave of whatever group provides the security.

A democracy flirts with the danger of becoming a slave in direct ratio to the numbers of its citizens who work, but do not own / or who own, but do not work; or who distribute, as politicians do, but do not produce. The danger of the “slave state” disappears in ratio to the numbers of people who own property and admit its attendant responsibilities under God. They can call their souls their own because they own and administer something other than their souls. Thus they are free.  [“New Slavery: Freedom without Property is Incomplete,” originally published in On Being Human: Reflections, On Life and Living, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1982.]

Sherman, Gordon  [Chairman of the Board, Midas International Corporation].  (The Second Income Plan) is thrilling, breathtaking in its simple, clear, unanswerable descriptions…..

Siculus, Diodorus.  It is absurd to entrust the defense of a country to people who own nothing of it.  First Century B.C. Greek historian.

Simmons, John and Mares, William.  The rising feeling of powerlessness is one result of the system of decision-making and ownership that have been relentlessly, and often unwittingly, developed during this century to take responsibility away from people. Participation can re-engage people in their lives at work and renew their organizations. They learn that by working together they can make a difference.  [Working Together, 1983.]

Simons, Henry (Founder of the Chicago (“Monetarist”) School of economics).  Attempting mischievous and salutary irritation of his peers . . . he [Keynes] may only succeed in becoming an academic idol of our worst cranks and charlatans — not to mention the possibilities of the book as the economic bible of a fascist movement….   [Comments on John Maynard Keynes’ The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, in Christian Century, July 22, 1936, pp. 1016, 1017.]

Simons, Henry C.  Private property in the instruments of production is an institutional device both for dispersing power and for securing effective organization of production. The only simple property system is that of a slave society with a single slave owner — which, significantly, is the limiting case of despotism and of monopoly. Departure from such a system is a fair measure of human progress. The libertarian good society lies at an opposite extreme, in the maximum dispersion of property compatible with effective production…. Basic to liberty are property rights in labor or personal capacities. The abolitions of slavery and serfdom are the great steps toward freedom — and, by the way, are striking reconciliations of apparent conflict between productional and distributional considerations. Property in one’s own services, however, is a secure, substantial right only where there are many possible buyers. It thus implies private property in other resources and freedom of independent organizations or firms. It also implies a distinctively modern institutional achievement, namely, the separation or dissociation of the economic and the political — a political order that sustains formal rights and a largely separate economic order that gives them substance….a society based on free, responsible individuals or families must involve extensive rights of property.  [A Political Credo, pp. 27-28.]

Simons, Henry C.  (Professor of Economics, University of Chicago) The libertarian good society lies…in the maximum dispersion of property compatible with effective production or, as process, in progressive reconciliation of conflicts between equality and efficiency. Such process involves increasing dispersion both of wealth among persons and families and of proximate productional control among enterprises or firms.…   [Economic Policy for a Free Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948, p. 27.]

Sithole, Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole (leader in Zimbabwe’s independence movement, founder of the Zimbabwe African National Union, author and political thinker).  To an American, that which deprives him of his freedom he regards as injustice, and that which allows him to enjoy that freedom he regards as justice. The concept of justice is as central to the totality of his being as freedom is, and this is not surprising, since the motivating idea behind the American Declaration of Independence was the fervent desire for justice.  [Excerpt from The Secret of American Success: Africa’s Great Hope, Ch. 28, “Freedom at the Helm,” pp. 215-217.]

If one examines [the American] idea of freedom, the individual, free enterprise, their Constitution, their political and economic structures as well as their mode of exploiting their natural resources, all these are shrouded in the idea of justice.”  Ibid.

A shocked sense of justice has to be removed and justice restored….  Ibid.

In the USA, where so many people compete for one and the same thing, where job opportunities, residential facilities, and food resources have to be spread over so many people, the question of justice becomes more imperative than ever before if communal and individual life is to be made possible and enjoyable.  Ibid.

[F]or the majority of Americans, collectivist or nationalized economy is morally wrong and therefore unjust. For them, free enterprise meets their keen sense of justice….  Ibid.

The U.S.A. economic policy and practice have been largely influenced by this thought that people shall own property in their own right and in order to be strong enough to control their own government.  Ibid.

It appears it would be quite un-American not to be suspicious of the government or to distrust it. History has taught them a little too much about the tragic frailties of human governments, but it has also driven home to them that they must control firmly political and economic power, which, handed over to any government in their land, could be easily used to oppress them.  Ibid.

The real struggle between an American government and the people was one of power, which was settled when they designed their Constitution, which conceded the sovereignty of the people when it came to politics, and the sovereignty of the consumer when it came to economics.  Ibid.

Smith, Adam.  The annual produce of the land and labor of any nation can be increased to its value by no other means, but by increasing either the number of its productive labourers, or the productive powers of those labourers who before had been employed…. The productive powers of the same number of labourers cannot be increased, but in consequence of an increase in capital or the funds destined for maintaining them.  The productive powers of the same number of labourers cannot be increased, but in consequence of either some addition and improvement of those machines and instruments which facilitate and abridge labour….  [The Wealth of Nations, Book Two, Chapter Three, Modern Library: New York, p.326.]

Smith, Adam. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable.

Smith, Adam.  The man who borrows in order to spend will soon be ruined, and he who lends to him will generally have occasion to repent of his folly. To borrow or to lend for such a purpose, therefore, is in all cases, where gross usury is out of the question, contrary to the interest of both parties; and though it no doubt happens sometimes that people do both the one and the other; yet, from the regard that all men have for their own interest, we may be assured that it cannot happen so very frequently as we are sometimes apt to imagine. Ask any rich man of common prudence to which of the two sorts of people he has lent the greater part of his stock, to those who, he thinks, will employ it profitably, or to those who will spend it idly, and he will laugh at you for proposing the question.  [The Wealth of Nations, Book II, Chapter 4, “Of Stock Lent at Interest.” p. 313.]

Smith, Adam.  The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted to no council and senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander.  Modern society is hypnotized by socialism. It is prevented by socialism from seeing the mortal danger it is in. And one of the greatest dangers of all is that you have lost all sense of danger, you cannot even see where it’s coming from as it moves swiftly towards you.  [“Solzhenitsyn’s Warning,” The Washington Post, April 4, 1976, p. C5.]

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. We hear a constant clamor for rights, rights, always rights, but so very little about responsibility. And we have forgotten God. The need now is for selflessness, for a spirit of sacrifice, for a willingness to put aside personal gains for the salvation of the whole Western world.  [The Wall Street Journal, June 23, 1983.]

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander.  [T]he generation now coming out of Western schools is unable to distinguish good from bad. Even those words are unacceptable. This results in impaired thinking ability.  [The Wall Street Journal, June 23, 1983.]

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander.  One world, one mankind cannot exist in the face of six, four or even two scales of values: We shall be torn apart by this disparity of rhythm, this disparity of vibrations.…

Our 20th Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors; our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, radical conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes. The primeval refusal to accept a compromise has been turned into a theoretical principle and is considered the virtue of orthodoxy. It demands millions of sacrifices in ceaseless civil wars, it drums into our souls that there is no such thing as unchanging, universal concepts of goodness and justice, that they are all fluctuating and inconstant.…

Violence, less and less embarrassed by the limits imposed by centuries of lawfulness, is brazenly and victoriously striding across the whole world, unconcerned that its infertility has been demonstrated and proved many times in history. What is more, it is not simply crude power that triumphs abroad, but its exultant justification. The world is being inundated by the brazen conviction that power can do anything, justice nothing.…

The young, at an age when they have not yet any experience other than sexual, when they do not yet have years of personal suffering and personal understanding behind them, are jubilantly repeating our depraved Russian blunders of the 19th Century, under the impression that they are discovering something new. They acclaim the latest wretched degradation on the part of the Chinese Red Guards as a joyous example. In shallow lack of understanding of the age-old essence of mankind, in the naive confidence of inexperienced hearts they cry: Let us drive away those cruel, greedy oppressors, governments, and the new ones (we), having just laid aside grenades and rifles, will be just and understanding. Far from it.…

But of those who have lived more and understand, those who could oppose these young—many do not dare oppose, they even suck up, anything not to appear conservative. Another Russian phenomenon of the 19th Century which Dostoyevsky called slavery to progressive quirks.…

The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles.…

The price of cowardice will only be evil. We shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.  [The Wall Street Journal, September 6, 1972, p. 14.]

Spencer, Herbert.  All Socialism involves slavery.  [“Man Versus the State,” The Coming Slavery. 1884.]

Spencer, Herbert.  That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labors under coercion to satisfy another’s desires.  [Quoted in Freedom Daily, March 1990.]

Springfield Republican.  Excess profits are made by others; our own profits are merely the fitting rewards of diligence.

State Journal,  The James Ramey, U.A.W. representative, said the plan was unique and preliminary reports from the union legal department indicated it was legal and permissible under income tax laws….

“It has great possibilities,” said John Rogers of East Lansing, a two-year employee and chairman of the bargaining committee. “I think every employee will benefit by it more than the incentive pay program. It offers better prospects in a long term way.”  [Response to the proposal to adopt ESOP at the Lundberg Screw Products Co., in an article published in The State Journal, Lansing, Michigan, February 2, 1975.]

Stewart, Justice Potter.  “[T]he dichotomy between personal liberties and property rights is a false one. Property does not have rights. People have rights.

In fact, a fundamental interdependence exists between the personal right to liberty and the personal right in property. Neither could have meaning without the other.  [U.S. Supreme Court, 1972.]

Stickley, Gustav.  It should be the privilege of every worker to take advantage of all the improved methods of working that relieve him from the tedium and fatigue of purely mechanical toil, for by this means he gains leisure for the thought necessary to working out his designs, and for the finer touches that the hand alone can give.  So long as he remains master of his machinery it will serve him well, and his power of artistic expression will be freed rather than stifled by turning over to it work it is meant to do.  The trouble is that we have allowed the machine to master us.  [“The Use and Abuse of Machinery, and Its Relation to the Arts and Crafts” The Craftsman, November 1906, p. 205.]

Stowe, C.E. (writer and son of Harriet Beecher Stowe).  Common sense is the knack of seeing things as they are, and doing things as they ought to be done.

Strauss, Robert S. (1918-2014. Former Democratic Party Chairman and presidential confidante to Presidents Carter, Reagan and Bush)  Nothing disturbs me more than the downward trend of productivity in our nation today. The consequences of a decrease in productivity are a diminished standard of living, higher labor costs, less competitive prices, and more inflation.…

I am fascinated to hear of the impact that ESOPs have had on work-force morale in corporations of all sizes such as Sears Roebuck, Potomac Electric Power, Lowe’s Companies and the Dow Chemical Company.…

Few concepts are as basic as the role of workers in our economic structure and their participation in equity ownership.  [Statement before Senate Finance Committee, July 20, 1978,]

Sun Tzu Wu (c. 500 B.C.)  Hence to fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.  [The Art of War, translated by Lionel Giles, Luzac & Co., London, 1910, p. 17.]

Sun Tzu Wu.  He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all the ranks.  [The Art of War, translated by Lionel Giles, Luzac & Co., London, 1910, p. 23-4.]

Sutherland, Justice George.  It is not the right of property which is protected, but the right to property. Property, per se, has no rights; but the individual — the man — has three great rights, equally sacred from arbitrary interference: the right to his life, the right to his liberty, the right to his property…. The three rights are so bound together as to be essentially one right. To give a man his life but deny him his liberty, is to take from him all that makes his life worth living. To give him his liberty but take from him the property which is the fruit and badge of his liberty, is to still leave him a slave.  [Principle or Expedient? Annual Address to the New York State Bar Association, 21 January 1921, p. 18.]

Tacitus.  Nothing mortal is so unstable and subject to change as power which has no foundation. (Nihil rerum mortalium tam instabile ac fluxum est quam fama potentiæ non sua vi nixæ.) P. Cornelius Tacitus c. AD55—117, Annales, XIII, 19.

Taylor, Henry.  The philosophy which affects to teach us a contempt of money does not run very deep.

Taylor, John. (“John Taylor of Caroline”) Nobility and hierarchy are not the only modes of constituting orders, proper for fomenting national discontent, and introducing monarchy, if it is true, as Mr. Adams asserts, and as all mankind allow, “that wealth, is the great machine for governing the world.” Hence wealth, like suffrage, must be considerably distributed, to sustain a democratic republic; and hence, whatever draws a considerable proportion of either into a few hands, will destroy it. As power follows wealth, the majority must have wealth or lose power. If wealth is accumulated in the hands of a few, either by a feudal or a stock monopoly, it carries the power also; and a government becomes as certainly aristocratical, by a monopoly of wealth, as by a monopoly of arms. A minority, obtaining a majority of wealth or arms in any mode, becomes the government.  [From Inquiry Into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States, in Coker, Francis W., ed., Democracy, Liberty, and Property: Readings in the American Political Tradition, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1942, p. 493.]

Thatcher, Margaret.  We very much hope that as we get growth that we can reduce the burden of taxation, that we can reduce income tax and increase the amount of genuine free enterprise and business enterprise…. [T]his is going…toward the restoration of the personal responsibility, the independence, with every man a property owner, every man a capitalist.  [Interview with The Wall Street Journal, March 31, 1983, p. 28.]

Thucydides. The meaning of words had no longer the same relation to things…. Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic energy was the true quality of man…. [History of the Peloponnesian War.]

Tibbs, Robert C.  Until several months ago…I viewed ESOP as simply a new variation of the old “profit sharing” schemes which often had served as a bulwark against effective unionization…. The comments you (L.O. Kelso) made on 60 Minutes (March 16, 1975)…impelled me to seek additional information about two-factor theory and ESOP….

I have concluded that (ESOPs) make a helluva lot of sense, and that unions could have served their members far better than they have if they had made an effort to secure a second income for their members through negotiating employee stock ownership programs.  [Business Manager, Local 5-6 Gas Workers Union July 24, 1975.]

Tocqueville, Alexis de. All revolutions more or less threaten the tenure of property: but most of those who live in democratic countries are possessed of property — not only are they possessed of property but they live in the condition of men who set the greatest store upon their property.  [Democracy in America, p. 459.]

Tocqueville, Alexis de.  If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States — that is to say, they will owe their origin not to the equality but to the inequality of conditions.  [Democracy in America, p. 461.]

Tocqueville, Alexis de.  In America the principle of the sovereignty of the people is neither barren nor concealed, as it is with some other nations; it is recognized by the customs and proclaimed by the laws; it spreads freely, and arrives without impediment at its most remote consequences. If there is a country in the world where the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people can be fairly appreciated, where it can be studied in its application to the affairs of society, and where its dangers and its advantages may be judged, that country is assuredly America.… In some countries a power exists which, though it is in a degree foreign to the social body, directs it, and forces it to pursue a certain track. In others the ruling force is divided, being partly within and partly without the ranks of the people. But nothing of the kind is to be seen in the United States; there society governs itself for itself. All power centers in its bosom, and scarcely an individual is to be met with who would venture to conceive or, still less, to express the idea of seeking it elsewhere. The nation participates in the making of its laws by the choice of its legislators, and in the execution of them by the choice of the agents of the executive government; it may almost be said to govern itself, so feeble and so restricted is the share left to the administration, so little do the authorities forget their popular origin and the power from which they emanate. The people reign in the American political world as the Deity does in the universe. They are the cause and the aim of all things; everything comes from them, and everything is absorbed in them.  [Democracy in America, Volume I, New York: Alfred A. Knoph, 1994, pp. 55-58.]

Tocqueville, Alexis de In democratic countries as well as elsewhere most of the branches of productive industry are carried on at a small cost by men little removed by their wealth or education above the level of those whom they employ. These manufacturing speculators are extremely numerous; their interests differ; they cannot therefore easily concert or combine their exertions. On the other hand, the workmen have always some sure resources which enable them to refuse to work when they cannot get what they conceive to be the fair price of their labor. In the constant struggle for wages that is going on between these two classes, their strength is divided and success alternates from one to the other. It is even probable that in the end the interest of the working class will prevail, for the high wages which they have already obtained make them every day less dependent on their masters, and as they grow more independent, they have greater facilities for obtaining a further increase of wages. I shall take for example that branch of productive industry which is still at the present day the most generally followed in France and in almost all the countries of the world, the cultivation of the soil. In France most of those who labor for hire in agriculture are themselves owners of certain plots of ground, which just enable them to subsist without working for anyone else. When these laborers come to offer their services to a neighboring landowner or farmer, if he refuses them a certain rate of wages they retire to their own small property and await another opportunity.  [Democracy in America, Volume II, pp. 189-190.]

Tocqueville, Alexis de.  Justice is the end of government; it is the end of civil society. It has ever been and ever will be pursued, until either will be obtained or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.  [Democracy in America.]

Tocqueville, Alexis de.  Nations are less disposed to make revolutions in proportion as personal property is augmented and distributed among them, and as the number of those possessing it is increased.  [Democracy in America, p. 460.]

Tocqueville, Alexis de.  The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.  [Democracy in America.]

Tocqueville, Alexis de.  The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal, but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness.  [Democracy in America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994, Vol. II, p. 334.]

Toynbee, Arnold.  The most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming, not at the goal itself, but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.

Trotsky, Leon.  In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.

Trotsky, Leon. The dictatorship of the Communist Party is maintained by recourse to every form of violence.  [Terrorism and Communism, Paris, 1924, p. 71.]

Tucker, Robert W.  (Professor of political science at Johns Hopkins).  The moral problem in politics responds to the distinctive nature of politics. In its central preoccupation with power, politics is set off from other spheres of human activity. The exercise of power over others — whether it is sought only as an indispensable means toward the achievement of some distant goal or as an end in itself — is the characteristic and distinguishing feature of politics. … Moreover, the instruments by which the power of government is exercised are not limited as is the “politics” of any number of private organizations. When it is aimed at controlling the state, politics seeks to command an institution that asserts the right to exercise a monopoly of coercion — above all, physical coercion — over society. … It is the means characteristic of the pursuit of power that raises the moral issue at its most fundamental level. The primary function of morality in politics may be defined as the acceptance of restraints on the modes of group conflict in societies where, because of a scarcity of goods (wealth, power, status, etc.), men cannot fulfill all of their desires.  [“Morality in American Politics,” The Washington Post, March 3, 1977, p. A2.]

Turner, Prof. Jonathan Baldwin.  “As a general rule and for proper pursuits it is just for every person to be connected to property for the fulfillment of the common good.”

Twain, Mark.  The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

Twain, Mark.  The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so.

United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights (December 10, 1948)
Article 17(1) Everyone has the right to own property, individually and in association with others.
Article 17(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights.  No person shall…be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor shall property be taken for public use, without just compensation.  [Article V, December 15, 1791.]

U.S. Supreme Court.  No man would become a member of a community in which he could not enjoy the fruits of his honest labor and industry. The preservation of property, then, is a primary object of the social compact….The legislature, therefore, had no authority to make an act divesting one citizen of his freehold, and vesting it in another, without a just compensation. It is inconsistent with the principles of reason, justice and moral rectitude; it is incompatible with the comfort, peace and happiness of mankind; it is contrary to the principles of social alliance in every free government; and lastly, it is contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution. [Commenting on confiscation and redistribution to the needy. Vanhorne’s Lessee v. Dorrance, 2 U.S. 304, 310 (Dall. 1795), Justice William Paterson.]

USSR The USSR declares labor the duty of all citizens of the republic.  [Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.]

Vallery-Radot, Rene.  True theories…are the expression of actual facts and are characterized by being able to predict new facts, a natural consequence of these already known. In a word, the characteristic of a true theory is its fruitfulness.  [The Life of Pasteur.]

Vandenburg, Arthur H.  It is less important to redistribute wealth than it is to redistribute opportunity.

Veblen, Thorstein.  Socialism is a dead horse.

Village Voice.  Kelso: McLuhan of Economics? [April 28, 1975.]

Vishinsky, Andrei.  In our state, naturally, there is and can be no place for freedom of speech, press, and so on for the foes of socialism.  [The Law of the Soviet State, 1938, New York, 1948.]

von Hoffman, Nicholas.  We preach free enterprise capitalism. We believe in it, we give our lives in war for it, but the closest most of us come to profiting from it are a few miserable shares of stock in a company that doesn’t pay large enough dividends to keep a small mouse in cheese. The truth is, most of us are job serfs. At a time when invested capital returns 20 to 30 per cent, we have no capital. We only have our wages and salaries, and a debt so high that something like 20 cents on every dollar we earn is spent to pay off what we owe….  As citizens we’re supposed to function as independent political beings when we’re economic capons, near bankrupts, who’re saved from foreclosure because our creditors know that we, the vast noncapitalist majority, have nothing but next week’s paycheck….  Everybody’s going around telling everybody else, “Nothing works.”

We need a new idea. Louis Kelso has one. He’s been writing about it for 10 years, but we’ve been too preoccupied with war and Medicare to listen…. Kelso’s proposals do promise to free us from our morbid dependency on economic health through armament manufacture; they promise a way out of the welfare mess, out of food-stamp plans and ship subsidies, out of perpetual inflation, and they suggest a means of doing these things that isn’t too disruptive of wealth whereby 5 per cent of the population own the rest of us. He would do it without confiscation, without taking from the rich, or even diluting the value of what they own, without burdening us with a new, socialist, administrative apparat.

But if not Kelso, then something else, because a free people must own the nation they live in.  [The Washington Post, December 29 and 31,1969.]

von Hoffman, Nicholas.  We preach free enterprise capitalism. We believe in it, we give our lives in war for it, but the closest most of us come to profiting from it are a few miserable shares of stock in a company that doesn’t pay large enough dividends to keep a small mouse in cheese. The truth is, most of us are job serfs. At a time when invested capital returns 20 to 30 percent, we have no capital. We only have our wages and salaries, and a debt so high that something like 20c on every dollar we earn is spent to pay off what we owe….

Kelso’s proposals do promise to free us from our morbid dependency on economic health through armament manufacture; they promise a way out of the welfare mess, out of foodstamps and ship subsidies, out of perpetual inflation, and they suggest a means of doing these things without being too disruptive of the wealth of five percent of the population who own the rest of us.  [The Washington Post, December 23, 1969.]

Walinsky, Adam.  Of all the devices that have been invented to keep the status-poor in their place, putting them on the dole is by far the most effective. The size of the dole can be controlled so as to keep them always in comparative poverty, and thus unable to compete for higher status in the society; indeed, the fact of being on the dole itself leads to lessened aspiration and pride….A serious program must deal….not only (or even primarily) with pockets of economic poverty, but with the poverty of satisfaction, purpose, and dignity that affects us all.  [“Keeping the Poor in Their Place,” New Republic, July 4, 1964.]

Wall, Shannon J. (President, National Maritime Union of America).  We have followed with interest…the Employee Stock Ownership Plan in the reorganization of the Penn Central and other railroads…The National Maritime Union has been interested in the subject for some time….It may well be that the ESOP principle can provide a much needed stimulus to the free enterprise system. We are studying ways to apply the principle to some phase of the maritime industry to provide benefits for all concerned…maritime workers, management and the nation.  [June 7, 1974.]

Wall Street Journal Morality is not an academic or professional discipline. It is, rather, the assumption and execution of responsibilities; as Aristotle said, it is part of the nature of things. [Wall Street Journal, Letters to the Editor, February 23, 1976.]

Warren, Earl.  Our Bill of Rights, the most precious part of our legal heritage, is under subtle and pervasive attacks…In the struggle between our world and Communism, the temptation to imitate totalitarian security methods must be resisted day by day…When the rights of any individual or group are chipped away, the freedom of all erodes.  [Fortune, November, 1955.]

Washington, George.  If we desire to secure peace…it must be known that we are at all times ready for war. [cf. Vegetius: Qui desiderat pacem praeparet bellum  (“Whosoever desires peace, let him prepare for war.”)  [Epitoma Rei Militaris, prologue to book three] Farewell Address, 1796.]

Washington, George.  The administration of justice is the firmest pillar of government. [Letter to Randolph, 1789.]

Washington, George.   Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force.  Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.

Washington, George.  Cherish public credit…avoiding the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expense but by vigorous exertions in time of peace to discharge debts…not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear.  [Farewell Address, 1796.]

Webster, Daniel.  A disordered currency is one of the greatest political evils. It undermines the virtues necessary for the support of the social system, and encourages propensities destructive to its happiness. It wars against industry, frugality, and economy, and it fosters the evil spirits of extravagance and speculation.  [Congressional Record, March 4, 1946.]

Webster, Daniel. A representative form of government rests nor more on political contributions than on those laws which regulate the descent and transmission of property.  [Address, Massachusetts Convention, 1820.]

Webster, Daniel.  An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, the power to destroy.  [Argument before the Supreme Court, 1819, McCullough v. Maryland.]

Webster, Daniel.  Every generation there are those who want to rule well but they mean to rule. They promise to be good masters but they mean to be masters.

Webster, Daniel.  I shall oppose all slavery extension and all increase of slave representation in all places, at all times, under all circumstances, even against all inducements, against all supposed limitations of great interests, against all combinations, against all compromises.  [Senate address, Oregon debate.]

Webster, Daniel.  If you divorce capital from labor, capital is hoarded, and labor starves.

Webster, Daniel.  In the nature of things, those who have no property and see their neighbors possess much more than they think them to need, cannot be favorable to laws made for the protection of property. When this class becomes numerous, it grows clamorous. It looks on property as its prey and plunder, and is naturally ready, at time, for violence and revolution.  [Address, Massachusetts Convention, 1820.]

Webster, Daniel.  it would seem, then, to be the part of political wisdom to found government on property; and to establish such distribution of property, by the laws which regulate its transmission and alienation, as to interest the great majority of society in the protection of the government.  [Address, Massachusetts Convention, 1820.]

Webster, Daniel.  Justice, sir, is the great interest of man on earth. It is the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations together.  [Funeral Oration for Justice Story, September 12, 1845.]

Webster, Daniel.  Power naturally and necessarily follows property.  [Address, Massachusetts Convention, 1820.]

Webster, Daniel.  The freest government cannot long endure when the tendency of the law is to create a rapid accumulation of property in the hands of a few, and to render the masses poor and dependent. [Quoted by Sinclair, The Cry for Justice.]

Webster, Daniel.  The freest government, if it could exist, would not be long acceptable, if the tendency of the laws were to create a rapid accumulation of property in a few hands, and to render the great mass of the population dependent and penniless. In such a case, the popular power must break in upon the rights of property, or else the influence of property must limit and control the exercise of popular power.…In the nature of things, those who have not property, and seeing their neighbours possess much more than they think them to need, cannot be favorable to laws made for the protection of property. When this class becomes numerous, it grows clamorous. It looks on property as its prey and plunder, and is naturally ready, at all times, for violence and revolution. It would seem, then, to be the part of political wisdom to found government on property; and to establish such distribution of property, by the laws which regulate its transmission and alienation, as to interest the great majority of society in the protection of the government. This is, I imagine, the true theory and the actual practice of our republican institutions.  [Address to the Massachusetts Convention, 1820. Journal of Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of Delegates Chosen to Revise the Constitution of Massachusetts. Boston, 1853, pp. 304-317.]

Webster, Daniel.  There is not a more dangerous experiment than to place property in the hands of one class, and political power in those of another…. If property cannot retain the political power, the political power will draw after it the property.  [North American Review, July, 1820.]

Webster, Noah.  [October 16, 1758 – May 28, 1843. American lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English-language spelling reformer, political writer, editor, and prolific author.]  Let the people have property and they will have power — a power that will forever be exerted to prevent the restriction of the press, the abolition of trial by jury, or the abridgment of any other privilege.

Webster, Noah.  The liberty of the press, trial by jury, the Habeas Corpus Writ, even Magna Carta itself, although justly deemed the paladia of freedom, are all inferior considerations, when compared with the general distribution of real property among every class of people.

Webster, Noah.  The man who has half a million of dollars in property…has a much higher interest in the government, than the man who has little or no property.  [Letter to Daniel Webster.]

Weinberger, Caspar W.  We must recognize that personal freedoms diminish as the welfare state grows. The price of more and more public programs is less and less private freedom.  [August 1975.]

Weinberger, Casper W.  Kelso and Adler’s book could start a revolution.  [February 1958.]

White, Robert M. (President, National Academy of Engineering).  The pace and intensity of technological advance are without historical precedent. The creation of new industries may not provide enough jobs fast enough to replace those lost as a result of technologically caused productivity increases.  [Quoted in the Wall Street Journal, June 8, 1995.]

Walt Whitman (poet).  The greatest country, the richest country, is not that which has the most capitalists, monopolists, immense grabbings, vast fortunes, with its sad, sad foil of extreme, degrading, damning poverty, but the land in which there are the most homesteads, freeholds—where wealth does not show such contrasts high and low, where all men have enough….”  [Quoted from table talk, circa 1888-92, see “Intimate with Walt”, University of Iowa Press, Spring 2001.]

Wiesel, Elie.  [T]he opposite of love, I have learned, is not hate, but indifference.  [“Wiesel: ‘I have Seen the SS at Work…Their Victims'” The Washington Post, April 20, 1985, p. A7.

Wilde, Oscar.  The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.  [The Soul of Man Under Socialism.]

Wilson, Woodrow.  Business underlies everything in our national life, including our spiritual life. Witness the fact that in the Lord’s Prayer, the first petition is for daily bread. No one can worship God or love his neighbor on an empty stomach.

Wilson, Woodrow.  Liberty has never come from the government…. The history…of liberty is the history of the limitations of government power, not the increase of it.

Wilson, Woodrow. The great monopoly in this country is the money monopoly. So long as it exists, our old variety of freedom and individual energy of development are out of the question (1911).   [Quoted by Justice Brandeis, Other People’s Money, from The Great Quotations, George Seldes, ed.]

Wolfensohn, James.  Ownership is a sine qua non of sustainable development.  [Endorsement by World Bank President in The Ownership Solution by Jeff Gates, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA 1998.]

Wollstonecraft, Mary. (1759-1797) English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women’s rights.  Virtue can only flourish amongst equals.  [“A Vindication of the Rights of Men,” 1790.]

Wright, Frank Lloyd.  A civilization is only a way of life. A culture is the way of making that way of life beautiful. So culture is your office here in America, and as no stream can rise higher than its source, so you can give no more or better to architecture than you are. So why not go to work on yourselves, to make yourselves, in quality, what you would have your buildings be?

Wriston, Henry M.  The problem of abolishing want is not a problem in division, as the politicians so often aver; it is a problem of multiplication.

Yankelovich, Daniel.  [Employee participation] programs and employee ownership are important efforts to deal with powerlessness at work. 1981 interview.  [Quoted in Working Together, p. 265.]

Yunus, Muhammad.   If we are looking for one single action which will enable the poor to overcome their poverty, I would go for credit. Money is power. I have been arguing that credit should be accepted as a human right. If we can come up with a system which allows everybody access to credit while ensuring excellent repayment — I can give you a guarantee that poverty will not last long. If the helplessness and isolation of labour, who have nothing to sell but their labour, can be totally removed by connecting labour with capital through a universal credit system, we’ll then have other kinds of actors on the economic scene different from what the existing capitalist world would allow us to bring out.  [“Does the Capitalist System have to be the Handmaiden of the Rich?”, Grameen Dialogue, October, 1994.]

Yunus, Muhammad.  The essence of capitalism is expressed in two of its basic features: a) profit maximization and b) market competition. In their abstract formulations none of them was supposed to have anything conspiratorial against the poor. But in real life they turn out to be the “killers” of the poor — by making rich the richer and poor the poorer.   [“Does the Capitalist System have to be the Handmaiden of the Rich?”, Grameen Dialogue, October, 1994.]