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BOOK II THE DARK SIDE OF THE BUSINESS CYCLE HOW TO PROTECT YOUR FREEDOM AND INTERESTS FROM THE VICISSITUDES OF THE MARKETPLACE
"If the State does not acquire supremacy over such [vast private] enterprises, it becomes their puppet, and they become the real State." Bertrand Russell1 "In all of the panics there were recognizable constants. First came an expansion in business activity. This usually centered on some dominant form of investment. . . Then, as time passed, expansion gave way to speculation. . . The banks, needless to say, provided the money that financed the speculation that in each case preceded the crash." John Kenneth Galbraith2 "Capitalism and its civilization may be decaying, shading off into something else, or tottering toward a violent death." Joseph A. Schumpeter3 "The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest . . . The American Beauty rose can be produced in the splendor . . . only by sacrificing the early buds which grow around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God." John D. Rockefeller4 "As soon as men lived in society they must have noticed that some guilty men eluded the severity of the laws. . . 'Every family has misfortunes, and it was easy for us to inoculate the belief that these misfortunes were sent by a divine hand, the avenger of secret offences.'" Voltaire5 "Mankind are, in all ages, caught by the same baits: the same tricks played over and over again, still trepan them." David Hume6 "We must not even demand to know the explanation in all cases alike; there are some in which it is quite enough if the fact itself is exhibited, e.g. in the case of first principles; the fact is primary and a starting-point." Aristotle7 |
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| For references, see Bibliography. |