Alan Greenspan Quotes

(thirty-one of the first forty U.S. Post Office pilots were killed in the first six years).

Four decades after Thomas Edison’s spectacular illumination of Lower Manhattan in 1882, electricity had done little to make the country’s factories more productive.

America has been much better than almost every other country at resisting the temptation to interfere with the logic of creative destruction. In most of the world, politicians have made a successful business out of promising the benefits of creative destruction without the costs. Communists have blamed the costs on capitalist greed. Populists have blamed them on sinister vested interests. European-style socialists have taken a more mature approach, admitting that creation and destruction are bound together, but claiming to be able to boost the creative side of creative destruction while eliminating the destructive side through a combination of demand management and wise intervention. The result has usually been disappointing: stagnation, inflation, or some other crisis.

We are going through a period with no precedent in American history.

Over the years I have had the most contact with Lee Kuan Yew, most recently in 2006, and have always found him impressive, even though we do not always see eye to eye. I met him first when he was George Shultz's guest at the famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) Bohemian Grove, a male only bonding retreat among the redwoods of California.

In 1900, work generally meant sometimes dangerous and usually backbreaking physical labor. Farmers had to wrestle with the elements from droughts that could make the land too hard to work, floods that could drench them, and insects that constantly bit at them. Manual laborers had to wrestle with heavy machines that could kill or maim them if not properly handled. By 2000, it largely meant sitting in the office. The number of Americans who died as a result of accidents at work fell from 38 per 100,000 workers in 1900 to 4 per 100,000 in 2000.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that bar code scanners at checkout counters increased the speed that cashiers could ring up payments by 30 percent and reduced labor requirements of cashiers and baggers by 10 to 15 percent.

Slave owners invested a growing amount of capital in their slaves: by 1861, almost half the total value of the South’s capital assets was in the “value of negroes.

The big three television companies (CBS, ABC, and NBC) measured their audiences in tens of millions: when CBS broadcast the episode of I Love Lucy in which Lucy had a baby to coincide with the actress who played Lucy, Lucille Ball, also having a baby, on January 19, 1953, 68.8 percent of the country’s television sets were tuned in, a far higher proportion than were tuned in to Dwight Eisenhower’s inauguration the following day.

Winston Churchill once said to his fellow countrymen, “We have not journeyed across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.” Today, thanks to a malign combination of litigation, regulation, and pedagogical fashion, sugar-candy people are everywhere.

Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices. It is this superlatively moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventative law, snooping bureaucrats, and the chronic goad of fear.

Nor can private counterparties restrict supplies of gold, another commodity whose derivatives are often traded over-the-counter, where central banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities should the price rise.

The population of the Pacific states increased by 110 percent from 1940 to 1960.

I know you think you understand what you thought I said but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.

The Fabians laid the groundwork for modern social democracy, and their influence on the world would end up being at least as powerful as that of Marx.