Who Said It? Flashcards
“Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. It (the bourgeoisie) has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”
Karl Marx
“In the real world, however, countries which achieve labour scarcity continue to be surrounded by others which have abundant labour. Instead of concentrating on one country, and examining the expansion of its capitalist sector, we now have to see this country as part of the expanding capitalist sector of the world economy as a whole, and to enquire how the distribution of income inside the country and its rate of capital accumulation, are affected by the fact that there is abundant labour available elsewhere at a subsistence wage.”
Arthur Lewis
“Assuming then, my postulata as granted, I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. I see no way by which man can escape from the weight of this law which pervades all animated nature. No fancied equality, no agrarian regulations in their utmost extent, could remove the pressure of it even for a single century. And it appears, therefore, to be decisive against the possible existence of a society, all the members of which, should live in ease, happiness, and comparative leisure; and feel no anxiety about providing the means of subsistence for themselves and families.”
Thomas Malthus
“The aim and incentive of capitalist production is not a surplus value pure and simple, but a surplus value ever growing into larger quantities… this motive urges him to re-engage in reproduction over and over again… expansion becomes a coercive law, an economic condition of existence for the capitalist”
Rosa Luxemburg
“History in general, and especially the history of socialistic ventures, shows that ordinary men are seldom capable of pure ideal altruism for any considerable time
together, and that the exceptions are to be found only when the masterful fervour of a small band of religious enthusiasts makes material concerns to count for nothing in comparison with the higher faith.”
Alfred Marshall
“In order to realise his increased aggregate of products, the capitalist requires a larger market for his goods… capital increasingly employs militarism for implementing a colonial policy to divert purchasing power away from the non-capitalist strata… the accumulation of capital is raised to the highest power”
Rosa Luxemburg
“It is not industrial progress that demands the opening up of new markets and areas of investment, but a mal-distribution of consuming power which prevents the absorption of commodities and capital within the country… hungry mouths, ill-clad back, ill-furnished houses indicate countless unsatisfied material wants among our own”
John Hobson
“The question cannot be fully answered by economic science. For the answer depends partly on the moral and political capabilities of human nature, and on these matters the economist has no special means of information: he must do as others do and guess as best he can. But the answer depends in a great measure upon facts and inferences, which are within the province of economics; and this it is which gives to economic studies their chief and their highest interest.”
Alfred Marshall
“The former corresponds to the case in which the concern for others directly affects one’s own welfare. If the knowledge of the torture of others makes you sick, it is a case of sympathy; if it does not make you feel personally worse off, but you think it is wrong and are ready to do something to stop it, it is a case of commitment.”
Armatya Sen
“He looked rather blank when, on entering, he found that cloth had risen in price, and was two shillings a yard dearer than before. He expressed his surprise. “Why, there’s no end to my customers this market day,” said the draper. ‘I verily believe half the town means to have new coats, and I have not near cloth enough to furnish them all: so those that will have it must pay the price I ask, or go without.’”
Jane Marcet
“The struggle for markets, the greater eagerness of producers to sell than of consumers to buy, is the crowning proof of a false economy of distribution. Imperialism is the fruit of this false economy; ‘social reform’ is its remedy”
John Hobson
“The reason why savings are low in an undeveloped economy relatively to national income is not that the people are poor, but that capitalist profits are low relatively to national income. As the capitalist sector expands, profits grow relatively, and an increasing proportion of national income is re-invested.”
Arthur Lewis
“Economic character is by no means restricted to goods that are the objects of human economy in a social context. If an isolated individual’s requirements for a good are greater than the quantity of the good available to him, we will observe him retaining possession of every unit at his command, conserving it for employment in the manner best suited to the satisfaction of his needs, and making a choice between needs that he will satisfy with the quantity available to him and needs that he will leave unsatisfied. We will also find that the same individual has no reason to engage in this activity with respect to goods that are available to him in quantities exceeding his requirements.”
Carl Menger
“In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. Does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labour”
Karl Marx
“Most probably, our decisions to do something positive… can only be taken as a result of animal spirits – of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities”
John Maynard Keynes
“They (the wealthy industrialists) need Imperialism because they desire to use the public resources of their country to find profitable employment for capital that would otherwise be superfluous… It is Messrs. Rockefeller, Pierpont Morgan, Hanna and their associates who need Imperialism”
John Hobson
“The whole acts as one market, not because any of its members survey the whole field, but because their limited individual fields of vision sufficiently overlap so that through many intermediaries, the relevant information is communicated to all”
Friedrich A Hayek
“We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a foreign rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment, he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly that we suspect he is being stirred up against us by Albion, particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us.”
Frederic Bastiat
“From what has been said, we derive the principle that, with respect to given future time periods, our effective requirements for particular goods of higher order are dependent upon the availability of complementary quantities of the corresponding goods of higher order”
Carl Menger
“The complex of human activities directed to these four objectives is called economizing, and goods standing in the quantitative relationship involved in the preceding discussion are the exclusive objects of it. These goods are economic goods in contrast to such goods as men find no practical necessity of economizing—for reasons which, as we shall see later, can be traced to quantitative relationships accessible to exact measurement, just as this has been shown to be possible in the case of economic goods.”
Carl Menger
“The clear and direct tendency of the poor laws, is in direct opposition to these obvious principles: it is not, as the legislature benevolently intended, to amend the condition of the poor, but to deteriorate the condition of both poor and rich; instead of making the poor rich, they are calculated to make the rich poor”
David Ricardo
“In many cases the “regulation of competition” is a misleading term, that veils the formation of a privileged class of producers, who often use their combined force to frustrate the attempts of an able man to rise from a lower class than their own. Under the pretext of repressing anti-social competition, they deprive him of the liberty of carving out for himself a new career, where the services rendered by him to the consumers of the commodity would be greater than the injuries, that he inflicts on the relatively small group which objects to his competition.”
Alfred Marshall
“When Keynes’ General Theory appeared, it was thought at first that this was the book which would illuminate the problems of countries with surplus labour, since it assumed an unlimited supply of labour at the current price, and also, in its final pages, made a few remarks on secular economic expansion. Further reflection, however, revealed that Keynes’s book assumed not only that labour is unlimited in supply, but also, and more fundamentally, that land and capital are unlimited in supply-more fundamentally”
Arthur Lewis
