A Quote by Thomas Woods
Communism brought out the worst in human nature and crippled people's ability or ambition to participate in a market economy.
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As someone who lived under communism for most of my life I feel obliged to say that the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is not communism or its various softer variants. Communism was replaced by the threat of ambitious environmentalism.
Soviet-style communism failed, not because it was intrinsically evil, but because it was flawed. It allowed too few people to usurp too much power. Twenty-first century market capitalism, American-style, will fail for the same reasons. Both are edifices constructed by human intelligence, undone by human nature.
I believe in market economics. But to paraphrase Churchill - who said this about democracy and political regimes - a market economy might be the worst economic regime available, apart from the alternatives. I believe that people react to incentives, that incentives matter, and that prices reflect the way things should be allocated. But I also believe that market economies sometimes have market failures, and when these occur, there's a role for prudential - not excessive - regulation of the financial system.
A market economy is a tool - a valuable and effective tool - for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavour. It's a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.
How do people move on after they've lost the love of their life? It's a really interesting thing to look at. It happens to people every day: you see people... even in the worst, most war-torn places, people get up and continue with their lives. And it's a fascinating thing about human nature. That ability to just continue on.
The worst thing that you can do in terms of bringing a product up to the market is to be two days after someone else has brought a similar product to the international market-It's dead.
The market economy succeeds not because some people's interests are suppressed and other people are kept out of the market, but because people gain individual advantage from it.
But communism is the only thing which says all things should be brought into the hands of commons to benefit all people. In the past, you'd call that communism. I think in the future, we'll have to call that common sense.
War does horrible things to human beings, to societies. It brings out the best, but most often the worst, in our human nature.
Instead of engaging in cutthroat competition, we should strive to create value. In economic terms, this means a transition from a consumer economy - the mad rush for ownership and consumption - to a constructive economy where all human beings can participate in the act of creating lasting worth.
We need to enact comprehensive immigration reform, to bring people out of the shadows and empower them to more fully and freely participate in their communities and the economy. And we need to invest in our nation's deteriorating infrastructure - investments that would create jobs and benefit all sectors of the economy.
The most serious problems lie in the financial sphere, where the economy's debt overhead has grown more rapidly than the 'real' economy's ability to carry this debt. [...] The essence of the global financial bubble is that savings are diverted to inflate the stock market, bond market and real estate prices rather than to build new factories and employ more labor.
I find it quite useful to think of a free-market economy - or partly free market economy - as sort of the equivalent of an ecosystem. Just as animals flourish in niches, people who specialize in some narrow niche can do very well.
The biggest changes in a women's nature are brought by love; in man, by ambition
When I say the economy is shrinking, it's the economy of the 99%, the people who have to work for a living and depend on earning money for what they can spend. The 1% makes its money basically by lending out their money to the 99%, on charging interest and speculating. So the stock market's doubled, the bond market's gone way up, and the 1% are earning more money than ever before, but the 99% are not. They're having to pay the 1%.
Communism is in conflict with human nature.
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