The essenTial Guide To

Capitalism

A Treasury of Quotes on the Subject

EXpaNDiNG THE maRKEtplaCEOF iDEas “I believe totally in a capitalist system. I only wish

that someone would try it.” Frank Lloyd Wright

America’s economic system and its successes have been traditionally identified with capitalism. However, despite capitalism’s remarkable track record, it’s not an easy time to be an advocate for it. The business leaders who keep our country growing are often denounced as “greedy” or “selfish” for creating the wealth that has allowed the United States to become the most prosperous nation in the history of the world.

The Clemson Institute celebrates businessmen as heroes, recognizing the enormous significance of their contributions. Our academic programs will equip advocates to defend the moral right of businessmen to produce, trade and profit from their activities without government interference.

This booklet is a resource of valuable insights on capitalism from some of its greatest spokesmen. We hope it will stimulate a world-class conversation on the nature and meaning of capitalism.

The Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism is America’s first and only university-based research and teaching center dedicated to exploring the moral, legal, political, and economic foundations of capitalism.

The Clemson Institute was founded in 2005 to educate a new generation of students about the moral requirements of a free society.

With the support of some of the world’s most distinguished scholars, the Clemson Institute is working to change the intellectual culture through public-policy research, teaching, and educational outreach.

BUilDiNG our FOUNDatiON

C. Bradley Thompson Executive Director, BB&T Research Professor

clemson.edu/capitalism

2“When I say “capitalism,” I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism—with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.”

Ayn Rand

“When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.”

Voltaire

“By virtue of exchange, one man’s prosperity is beneficial to all others.”

Frederic Bastiat

“Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it.”

Thomas Sowell

“Competition is merely the absence of oppression.”

Frederic Bastiat

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HAT CAPITALISM IS

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“In a free market, all prices, wages, and profits are determined — not by the arbitrary whim of the rich or of the poor, not by anyone’s “greed” or by anyone’s need — but by the law of supply and demand. The mechanism of a free market reflects and sums up all the economic choices and decisions made by all the participants. Men trade their goods or services by mutual consent to mutual advantage, according to their own independent, uncoerced judgment. A man can grow rich only if he is able to offer better values — better products or services, at a lower price — than others are able to offer.”

Ayn Rand

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ARKETS WORK

“The economic value of a man’s work is determined, on a free market, by a single principle: by the voluntary consent of those who are willing to trade him their work or products in return. This is the moral meaning of the law of supply and demand.”

Ayn Rand

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

Adam Smith

“As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry . . . he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”

Adam Smith

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“In the department of economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause - it is seen. The others unfold in succession - they are not seen: it is well for us, if they are foreseen.”

Frederic Bastiat

“Wealth, in a free market, is achieved by a free, general, “democratic” vote—by the sales and the purchases of every individual who takes part in the economic life of the country. Whenever you buy one product rather than another, you are voting for the success of some manufacturer. And, in this type of voting, every man votes only on those matters which he is qualified to judge: on his own preferences, interests, and needs. No one has the power to decide for others or to substitute his judgment for theirs.”

Ayn Rand

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“It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; I consider the real vice is making losses.”

Winston Churchill

“Call it what you want—capitalism, free enterprise, laissez faire or whatever—but a system that upholds property rights and otherwise allows free people to be themselves is remarkable precisely because it’s not a “system” per se. No deluded, pretentious planners devise or direct it. It’s no Rube Goldberg contraption of mandates and decrees. It’s simply what happens when you leave peaceful people alone. They produce more and satisfy human wants to a far greater extent than empty nanny-state promises could ever hope to deliver.”

Walter Williams

“A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Despite the miracles of capitalism, it doesn’t do well in popularity polls. One of the reasons is that capitalism is always evaluated against the non-existent, non-realizable utopias of socialism or communism. Any earthly system, when compared to a Utopia, will pale in comparison. But for the ordinary person, capitalism, with all of its warts, is superior to any system yet devised to deal with our everyday needs and desires.”

Walter Williams

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/ SUCCESS OF CAPITALISM

“Capitalism has created the highest standard of living ever known on earth. The evidence is incontrovertible. The contrast between West and East Berlin is the latest demonstration, like a laboratory experiment for all to see.”

Ayn Rand

“Take a view of the Royal Exchange in London, a place more venerable than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together, as though they all professed the same religion, and give the name of infidel to none but bankrupts. There the Presbyterian confides in the Anabaptist, and the Churchman depends on the Quaker’s word.”

Voltaire

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“It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense. . .They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expense, and they may safely trust private people with theirs.”

Adam Smith

“The ‘private sector’ of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and the ‘public sector’ is, in fact, the coercive sector.”

Henry Hazlitt

“When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”

P. J. O’Rourke

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“It has often been found that profuse expenditures, heavy taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt tribunals, disastrous wars, seditions, persecutions, conflagrations, inundation, have not been able to destroy capital so fast as the exertions of private citizens have been able to create it.”

Thomas Babington Macauley

“If you bound the arms and legs of gold- medal swimmer Michael Phelps, weighed him down with chains, threw him in a pool and he sank, you wouldn’t call it a ‘failure of swimming.’ So, when markets have been weighted down by inept and excessive regulation, why call this a failure of capitalism?”

Peter Boettke

“Private capitalism makes a steam engine; State capitalism makes pyramids.”

Frank Chodorov

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FIVE / ROLE OF GOVERNMENT

“When more of the people’s sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government and expenses of its economical administration, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of free government.”

Grover Cleveland

“I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”

Winston Churchill

“When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state, this violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people.”

P. J. O’Rourke

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“If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”

Henry Ford

“A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.”

Henry Ford

“Capitalism demands the best of every man – his rationality – and rewards him accordingly. It leaves every man free to choose the work he likes, to specialize in it, to trade his product for the products of others, and to go as far on the road of achievement as his ability and ambition will carry him.”

Ayn Rand

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Thomas Edison

“You can’t ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.”

Steve Jobs“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Michael Jordan

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“The moral justification of capitalism does not lie in the altruist claim that it represents the best way to achieve “the common good.” It is true that capitalism does...but this is merely a secondary consequence. The moral justification of capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man’s rational nature, that it protects man’s survival qua man, and that its ruling principle is: justice.”

Ayn Rand

“Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don’t turn up at all.”

Sam Ewing

“The man who has the largest capacity for work and thought is the man who is bound to succeed.”

Henry Ford

“I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can reestablish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty.”

Calvin Coolidge

“Commerce is a cure for the most destructive prejudices; for it is almost a general rule, that whereever we find agreeable manners, there commerce flourishes; and that wherever there is commerce, there we meet with agreeable manners.”

Montesquieu

“Every man lives by exchanging.” Adam Smith

YOUR iDEasUse this space for noting thoughts. Help us continue the conversation by sharing your ideas about capitalism in the modern world with us at cisc@clemson.edu

“By virtue of exchange, one man’s prosperity is beneficial to all others.” Frederic Bastiat

The mission of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism is to shape America’s future by educating a new generation of young people who will understand proper moral foundations of a free society.

If you are interested in learning more about the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism, including our academic program and summer conferences, please see our website for more information:

iNvEst in amERiCa’s FUtURE

clemson.edu/capitalism cisc@clemson.edu

facebook.com/clemsoncapitalism

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A publication by:

the Clemson Institutefor the

Study of Capitalism