Awesome Quotes from Author Michael Crichton

2018 marks ten years since we lost Michael Crichton, one of the most influential authors of the past century. Crichton gave us Jurassic Park, E.R. Westworld, Twister, Coma, The Andromeda Strain, The Great Train Robbery, Congo, Disclosure, and Sphere. His genius is showcased in many of the eminently quotable pearls of wisdom from his many books and speeches. Here are only a few of those:

"Entertainment has nothing to do with reality. Entertainment is antithetical to reality."
Jurassic Park

"They just posture and pontificate. Nobody tests. Nobody does field research. Nobody dares to solve the problems-because the solution might contradict your philosophy, and for most people clinging to beliefs is more important than succeeding in the world."
State of Fear

"like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there.… And at the end of your life, your whole existence has that same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day."
Jurassic Park

"I have great respect for the corrosive influence of bias, systematic distortions of thought, the power of rationalization, the guises of self-interest, and the inevitability of unintended consequences."
State of Fear

"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. -MARK TWAIN"
State of Fear

"I've seen a heap of trouble in my life, and most of it never came to pass," Mark Twain is supposed to have said.  At this point in my life, I can only agree.  So many fears have turned out to be untrue or wildly exaggerated that I no longer get so excited about the latest one."

"We live in a world of frightful givens. It is given that you will behave like this, given that you will care about that. No one thinks about the givens. Isn't it amazing? In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought."
Jurassic Park

"Terror can fill any space"
Sphere

"Right now, scientists are in exactly the same position as Renaissance painters, commissioned to make the portrait the patron wants done. And if they are smart, they'll make sure their work subtly flatters the patron. Not overtly. Subtly. This is not a good system for research into those areas of science that affect policy. Even worse, the system works against problem solving. Because if you solve a problem, your funding ends. All that's got to change."
State of Fear

"Montaigne said three hundred years ago, 'Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known."
State of Fear

"The romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don't, they will die."

"The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide. For these same apes to imagine they can stabilize this atmosphere is arrogant beyond belief. They can't control the climate."
State of Fear

"Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results."

"The world changes. Ideologues and zealots don't."
State of Fear

"Professor Johnston often said that if you didn't know history, you didn't know anything. You were a leaf that didn't know it was part of a tree."
Timeline

"In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all."
State of Fear

"Biography," observed Oscar Wilde, "lends to death a new terror."
Dragon Teeth

"Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.' The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all."
The Lost World

"This is precisely the kind of critical turnabout that has always frustrated and infuriated architects. No less a figure than Sir Christopher Wren, writing two hundred years earlier, complained that 'the peoples of London may despise some eyesore until it is demolished, whereupon by magick the replacement is deemed inferior to the former edifice, now eulogized in high and glowing reference.'"
The Great Train Robbery

"It was terribly important that such women should marry. The failure to marry--spinsterhood--implied a kind of dreadful crippling, for it was universally acknowledged that "a woman's true position was that of administratrix, mainspring, guiding star of the home," and if she was unable to perform this function, she became a sort of pitiful social misfit, an oddity."
The Great Train Robbery

"Monster' is a relative term; to a canary, a cat is a monster. We're just used to being the cat."

"Even if you don't believe in any God, you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious."
State of Fear

“If there’s anything worse than a limousine liberal, it’s a Gulfstream environmentalist.”
State of Fear

“And of course we know that social control is best managed through fear.”
State of Fear

“Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough.”
State of Fear

"So what you have is a history of ignorant, incompetent, and disastrously intrusive intervention, followed by attempts to repair the intervention, followed by attempts to repair the damage caused by the repairs, as dramatic as any oil spill or toxic dump. Except in this case there is no evil corporation or fossil fuel economy to blame. This disaster was caused by environmentalists charged with protecting the wilderness, who made one dreadful mistake after another and, along the way, proved how little they understood the environment they intended to protect."
State of Fear

"Arguably the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century. DDT was the best agent against mosquitoes, and despite the rhetoric there was nothing anywhere near as good or as safe. Since the ban, two million people a year have died unnecessarily from malaria, mostly children. All together, the ban has caused more than fifty million needless deaths. Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler, ...And the environmental movement pushed hard for it."
"But DDT was a carcinogen."
"No, it wasn't. And everybody knew it at the time of the ban."
"It was unsafe."
"Actually, it was so safe you could eat it. People did just that for two years, in one experiment. After the ban, it was replaced by parathion, which is really unsafe. More than a hundred farm workers died in the months after the DDT ban, because they were unaccustomed to handling really toxic pesticides."
"We disagree about all this."
"Only because you lack the relevant facts, or are unwilling to face up to the consequences of the actions of organizations you support. Banning DDT will someday be seen as a scandalous blunder." "DDT was never banned."
"You're right. Countries were just told that if they used it, they wouldn't get foreign aid." Kenner shook his head. "But the unarguable point, based on UN statistics, is that before the DDT ban, malaria had become almost a minor illness. Fifty thousand deaths a year worldwide. A few years later, it was once again a global scourge. Fifty million people have died since the ban...Once again, there can be no action without harm."
State of Fear

“civilization doesn’t separate us from nature...Civilization protects us from nature.
State of Fear

"I am certain there is too much certainty in the world."

"This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynmann called it a disease. I fear he is right."

"We need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead."

"There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago? When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?"

"Let's be clear: all professions look bad in the movies. And there's a good reason for this. Movies don't portray career paths, they conscript interesting lifestyles to serve a plot. So lawyers are all unscrupulous and doctors are all uncaring. Psychiatrists are all crazy, and politicians are all corrupt. All cops are psychopaths, and all businessmen are crooks. Even moviemakers come off badly: directors are megalomaniacs, actors are spoiled brats. Since all occupations are portrayed negatively, why expect scientists to be treated differently?"

13 Essential Books to Shape the Libertarian Worldview

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There are books that every libertarian should read and books every libertarian has read, but those circles don’t perfectly overlap. Here are 13 diverse book recommendations for well-rounded thinkers.
Economic Sophisms – Frederic Bastiat

The great French liberal and economist Frederic Bastiat is best known for his pamphlet The Law — a scathing indictment of the threat that socialism poses to justice and the rule of law. But he produced another great work in Economic Sophisms, a collection of essays meticulously exposing and ridiculing the economic fallacies committed by his fellow deputies in the French National Assembly.
Sophisms includes his satirical “Petition From the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns…and Generally of Everything Connected with Lighting” to the French legislature, asking for the government to blot out unfair foreign competition from a cheaper source of light — the sun.
Ahead of his time in many fields, he ruthlessly demolished fallacious arguments for protectionism, socialism, and redistribution with wit, humor, and incisive analysis.

Basic Economics + Applied Economics – Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics is one of the clearest introductions to the economic way of thinking and how it can be applied to a vast number of real world problems. Don’t be intimidated by its brick-like dimensions — it’s written with common sense and plain English. It’s highly readable and easy to digest in pieces, if you don’t finish it off in one sitting. If you get to the end and want more, don’t worry — you can continue “thinking beyond stage one” with Sowell’s Applied Economics.

Beyond Politics: The Roots of Government Failure – Randy Simmons
Public Choice is the most important branch of economics for understanding how and why governments work the way they do. Public Choice is essentially the science of political skepticism: using economic analysis to examine how the incentives of democracy guide the decision making of politicians, bureaucrats, voters, and special interests.

Randy Simmons’ Beyond Politics is the best and most accessible survey of Public Choice, explaining in clear and concrete terms just what things government cannot do — and what the consequences are when it tries to do them anyway.

The Problem of Political Authority – Michael Huemer
In this text, philosopher Michael Huemer exposes the shaky foundations of the most basic premises of government. Carefully tracing the implications of basic moral tenets that nearly everyone accepts, Huemer shows that the authority of the state is a chimera: there is no way to get from the ethical rules that govern how individuals should treat each other to a system that empowers a few people — “the state” — with the privileged moral position to issue coercive commands, while imposing on everyone else the moral duty to obey them. Huemer throws down the gauntlet and challenges the very notion of political authority — and with it, the special standard to which government actions are held.

The Myth of the Rational Voter – Bryan Caplan
The biggest reason why democracies choose bad policies is not selfishness, corruption, or lobbyists — it’s the voters themselves. Bryan Caplan documents the overwhelming empirical evidence that voters are not just ignorant about the most basic aspects of law, government, and economics, but they are also actively irrational in their preferences. In other words, voters are not just wrong but passionately and systematically wrong.

Worse, Caplan shows that these problems are inherent to the democratic system: voters have no incentive to be rational, well-informed, or coolheaded, and politicians have every reason to stoke prejudice and exploit voters’ ignorance. Limiting the scope of democratic power is the only sure way to limit the damage irrational voters can do.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments – Adam Smith
Everyone knows Adam Smith’s magisterial work The Wealth of Nations, but his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is essential for laying the ethical, psychological, and sociological groundwork for his later work in economics and philosophy. Today, Adam Smith is frequently demonized as the patron saint of greed and selfishness, but Moral Sentiments shows that Smith had a nuanced and deep understanding of human nature, our drives for virtue and vice, and the spirit and sympathies that help human beings thrive.

This book, published in 1759, was vastly ahead of its time in many fields, foreshadowing later developments in social science, moral philosophy, and social psychology. But it is also packed with deep and practical insights for any student of human nature. If you find Smith a little too daunting on the first attempt, Russ Roberts’ How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life is a short and friendly introduction to some of the insights in Moral Sentiments.

The God of the Machine – Isabel Paterson
First published in 1943, The God of the Machine was one of four books that emerged in the depths of World War II — along with Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, and Rose Wilder Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom — that launched the modern libertarian movement and helped turn the intellectual tide against collectivism.

At a time when socialism and fascism were conquering whole continents, Paterson set out a defense of individualism, the free market, and limited government that remains powerful and timely to this day. By tracing the role of individual freedom in the rise and fall of civilizations, the book re-centered the discussion of human history on its true subject: the individual.

No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority – Lysander Spooner
Legal theorist Lysander Spooner wrote this devastating critique of the U.S. Constitution in 1867. It remains one of the most thoughtful and hard-hitting criticisms of the American government and federal power. Spooner illustrates why the Constitution can carry no binding authority as a “contract” among “we the people.” At most, he argued, it could only bind and apply to the people who were actually alive at the time of its adoption, and then only to those who explicitly consented to its adoption. Therefore, breaking away from the union of states is “no treason.”

No Treason is also one of the most quotable individualist anarchist works. Any anarchist worth his or her salt knows by heart Spooner’s concise indictment of the Constitution: “But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.”

Radicals for Capitalism – Brian Doherty
Radicals for Capitalism is a weighty tome, summarizing centuries of classical liberal and libertarian history in one book. Reason magazine senior editor Brian Doherty goes to great lengths to capture the varying influences and factions within the broader libertarian movement. This book is an essential part of any collection on American political history, and friends of liberty will find a lot to learn and enjoy in its eyewitness histories and firsthand accounts of the motley crew that created and compose the modern American libertarian movement.

Democracy in America – Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville came to the United States to study prisons for the French government, but he ended up making his most important contributions by studying America’s free society in action. De Toqueville toured the country for nine months, observing how U.S. political, economic, religious, and social institutions worked together to foster human cooperation, and how that process of cooperation led to a thriving social order.

As Daniel J. D’Amico explains, “America’s early and rapid rate of economic development and its functioning social order resulted from a life spring of vibrant civil society. Families, clubs, churches, and various community groups provided early Americans with diverse opportunities to practice the art of association.”

The text, first published in 1835, endures as an influential and insightful account of American society and culture — it has been called the best book ever written about America — but more importantly, it describes the principles underlying social order itself. “In democratic countries the science of association is the mother science,” De Tocqueville wrote, “the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one.”

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress – Robert Heinlein
This novel explores a futuristic society in which a lunar colony revolts against rule from Earth. It is widely regarded as one of the best science fiction novels of all time, but its compelling portrait of a dystopian future and discussion of libertarian ideas make it an essential part of a libertarian bookshelf. Characters in the book range in their politics from self-proclaimed anarchist to would-be authoritarian, and the novel touches on libertarian themes such as spontaneous order, natural law, and individualism. Harsh Mistress would go on to win various awards, including the Hugo Award for best science fiction novel.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“The days rolled by in the camp — they were over before you could say ‘knife.’ But the years, they never rolled by; they never moved by a second.”

In this short novel, Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lays out — in brutal detail — an ordinary day in the life of one prisoner held in Stalin’s Siberian gulags: the bitter cold, the pervasive hunger, the savage punishments, the powerlessness, despair, and fear. Solzhenitsyn himself spent ten years in the gulag for insulting Stalin, and his own personal experience sharpens the story with heartbreaking detail. Tens of millions were churned through the gulags and slave labor camps in the Soviet Union; more than one million people would die there. Ivan Denisovich helps to humanize an ocean of terror and human suffering that all too easily blurs into a pile of statistics.

This piece ran at the LearnLiberty Blog

Daniel Bier

Daniel Bier is the executive editor of The Skeptical Libertarian.

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H. L. Mencken on the Ideal Form of Government

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All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to police him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. Thus one of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives.

The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are. Ludwig van Beethoven was certainly no politician. Nor was he a patriot. Nor had he any democratic illusions in him: he held the Viennese in even more contempt than he held the Hapsburgs. Nevertheless, I am convinced that the sharp criticism of the Hapsburg government that he used to loose in the cafes of Vienna had its effects that some of his ideas of 1818, after a century of germination, got themselves translated into acts in 1918. Beethoven, like all other first-rate men, greatly disliked the government he lived under. I add the names of Goethe, Heine, Wagner and Nietzsche, to keep among Germans. That of Bismarck might follow: he admired the Hohenzollern idea, as Carlyle did, not the German people or the German administration. In his “Errinerungen,” whenever he discusses the government that he was a part of, he has difficulty keeping his contempt within the bounds of decorum.

Nine times out of ten, it seems to me, the man who proposes a change in the government he lives under, no matter how defective it may be, is romantic to the verge of sentimentality. There is seldom, if ever, any evidence that the kind of government he is unlawfully inclined to would be any better than the government he proposes to supplant. Political revolutions, in truth, do not often accomplish anything of genuine value; their one undoubted effect is simply to throw out one gang of thieves and put in another. After a revolution, of course, the successful revolutionists always try to convince doubters that they have achieved great things, and usually they hang any man who denies it. But that surely doesn’t prove their case. In Russia, for many years, the plain people were taught that getting rid of the Czar would make them all rich and happy, but now that they have got rid of him they are poorer and unhappier than ever before. The Germans, with the Kaiser in exile, have discovered that a shoemaker turned statesman is ten times as bad as a Hohenzollern. The Alsatians, having become Frenchmen again after 48 years anxious wait, have responded to the boon by becoming extravagant Germanomaniacs. The Tyrolese, though they hated the Austrians, now hate the Italians enormously more. The Irish, having rid themselves of the English after 700 years of struggle, instantly discovered that government by Englishmen, compared to government by Irishmen, was almost paradisiacal. Even the American colonies gained little by their revolt in 1776. For twenty-five years after the Revolution they were in far worse condition as free states than they would have been as colonies. Their government was more expensive, more, inefficient, more dishonest, and more tyrannical. It was only the gradual material progress of the country that saved them from starvation and collapse, and that material progress was due, not to the virtues of their new government, but to the lavishness of nature. Under the British hoof they would have got on just as well, and probably a great deal better.

The ideal government of all reflective men, from Aristotle to Herbert Spencer, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes being no government at all. This ideal, I believe, will be realized in the world twenty or thirty centuries after I have passed from these scenes and taken up my home in Hell.

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The Religion of Socialism, by Professor Leo Wiener 1920

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Socialism is only a form of religion, differing in no way from previous religions. Religion has always taken the side of the suffering proletariat, from Buddha and Christ to St. Augustine and St. Jerome. This is because religion has been founded on promises of rewards in Heaven, which tickled the poor people who could get nothing on earth. Socialism resembles Mohammedanism (Islam) exactly, because it wants to get salvation by fire and sword; kill as many people as possible and you will have your Heaven on earth—maybe. That is why in discussions the Socialists have the best side: they compare a perfect system of promises with an imperfect one of fact.

Garabed came to me with his perpetual motion machine last year and spent a few days with me. and then he went to Washington with the fire of a walking delegate in his face: and they took his machine and put it in a room with all the hundreds of other models that have all been absolutely perfect, except that they wouldn’t work.

Now, here is Capitalism that has been going for 7000 years, and the Socialist comes along and says the machine is breaking down, and he offers a perfect Garabed instead. Let us rather improve the machine that we have and not experiment with a Garabed.

Why, Capitalism is infinitely superior to Socialism. Socialism has no history. Take Capitalistic Athens and Socialistic Sparta. All we know about Sparta is that they learnt to steal. Take Peru—there were only two classes, lords and laborers. There are just two classes in Russia today, the man that works with his hands and the man that works with his mouth. There were hundreds of thousands of these systems in history; they were invariably failures because distribution, they said, belongs to the men at thc bottom. All civilization is due to Capitalism—to our system of savings and distribution.

Moreover, Socialism kills desire. It makes a dead level with no wanting, no seeking. Preachers take to it now because it is trying to do something for the proletariat. Let it be a party, like the Catholics, Mormons, Mohammedans,-all right; it has its excellent place there; but a state institution—never.

Look at Russia today. Some people who can't speak Russian, who know nothing about Russia, say the Bolsheviks are doing all right. Bolshevism is a complete and horrible failure. Bolshevism is the logical successor to Socialism, after which the vacuum. There is a Socialist instinct in Russia, they say. That is not true. They are Socialistic only to the extent that they are undeveloped. In the sixteenth century they began to make the villages pay taxes. They paid socialistically—~hence were called Communes. A young Danish Socialist went over there. (All young people are Socialists; when they get mature they quit.) He found prosperity only where there was Capitalism. There the straw thatch gave way to titles, the piano, the graphophone were found: there civilization begins.

There have been three hundred Socialist experiments in this country, and they never went far. They were right around here—Roxbury, Hopedale— the governors of them gave them up. I lived in one of the first Russian Socialist colonies in the seventies—a cooperative house-management scheme. It began in hysteria and finished in hysteria.

I hold no brief for Capitalism. But I am unwilling to give up what has worked for 7000 years for something that has never once worked in 7000 years.

If You're Warm Right Now, Thank Capitalism

Last night, the temperature fell three degrees an hour. As I write this, it is negative 10 degrees outside. A “once in a generation” polar vortex has swept into the American Midwest from the Arctic.
I am lucky to be alive. It would take me just a couple of hours to die from hypothermia if I were outside in such weather. But I am not just alive, I am comfortable. It is a balmy 73 degrees in my home. I am relaxing by my gas fireplace that gives off a warm heat as gentle flames dance about and please my eye. I can hear the gentle whir of fans blowing heat around my living room, generated by my furnace. I write this on my comfortable sofa with a computer on my lap powered by electricity and fed information via the internet, itself powered by electricity and glass fiber conduits that carry information to me from computers and minds from across the earth.

My refrigerator is full. I went to the grocery store last night in my car that is powered by an internal combustion engine and fueled by gasoline, which was refined from petroleum that was pumped out of wells drilled in miles-long holes, transported in pipelines and rail cars, refined at complex and gargantuan refineries, and made accessible to me via pumps placed at stations in convenient locations for me to use. I am eating an orange that was grown in Florida or Brazil thousands of miles away and transported to me by railroads and airplanes powered by jet engines.

Then vs. Now

You can continue this description of bounties that, as we go back in time, human beings could only dream about. Even to a person living as recently as 1900, the internet and jet airplanes would have seemed like science fiction. To a person living in 1800, electricity and railroads and combustion engines would have seemed like science fiction. And to a peasant working the fields—as more than 90 percent of all humans did for the past 10,000 years until the 1800s—technology itself is a concept they could not even understand, as they lived lives so hard that we can scarcely imagine it.
A couple statistics hardly do justice to the gulf in quality of life between 1800 and today.

• Life Expectancy (Years): 29 vs. 72
  
• Children Dying Before Age 5: 43 percent vs. 4 percent
  
• Illiteracy: 88 percent vs. 15 percent
• Living in Extreme Poverty (Less than $1.90 per day): 89 percent vs. 10 percent

For those who did survive, most of them were in pain most of the time. Today, most of us live pain-free lives most of the time. Two hundred-plus years ago, George Washington rarely smiled because his wooden teeth caused him near constant pain. Today, one can have pain-free and near permanent dental implants, while going to the dentist itself—which used to be a terrifying ordeal—is nearly pain-free due to the inventions of novocaine and high-speed dental drills.

Thank Capitalism

Who can I thank for all this? I can thank the inventors who invented the internal combustion engine and the electric grid. I can thank the scientists who discovered the principles of optics and physics that made possible the transmission of data on fiber optic lines. I can thank the philosophers who discovered the principles of reason used by the scientists. I can thank the businessmen who put it all together and delivered it to customers. And I can thank the financiers who picked the winning ideas and the winning businessmen who could turn those ideas into life-giving products and services.
To the extent it exists, capitalism unleashes the human ingenuity that keeps me—and millions of my fellows—alive and comfortable on this unseasonably cold morning.


In a word, I can thank capitalism. Capitalism is the political and economic system that makes all of it possible. Capitalism is the system of liberty—of individual freedom and private property rights—that enables and rewards individuals to take their ideas and turn them into the products and services that benefit themselves and others through trade. To the extent it exists, capitalism unleashes the human ingenuity that keeps me—and millions of my fellows—alive and comfortable on this unseasonably cold morning.

Unfortunately, capitalism exists only imperfectly in the world but, to the extent societies embrace it, they are experiencing economic growth and prosperity that translates, on the ground and in people’s homes, to the comfort, safety, and pleasure that I am experiencing now. Without these life-giving technologies two hundred years ago, I might have suffered frostbite or died on a day like today.
Thank you capitalism—and the scientists, inventors, businessmen, and financiers who flourish in capitalism—for keeping me alive and safe this frosty morning.

This article was reprinted from the American Institute for Economic Research.

Raymond C. Niles

Raymond C. Niles is a Senior Fellow the American Institute for Economic Research and Assistant Professor of Economics & Management at DePauw University. He holds a PhD in Economics from George Mason University and an MBA in Finance & Economics from the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University. 

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Liberty, Socialism and Equality

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Liberty and Equality, from The Case Against Socialism: A Handbook for Speakers and Candidates 1908

In order to concede a wholly imaginary and quite impossible Equality, Socialism must make devastating inroads upon personal Liberty. "Equal — but slaves" would be an infinitely more distasteful condition than that of being "Free, if Unequal." Equality, however, is impossible of attainment. As President Butler of Columbia University writes:

"Nature knows no such thing as Equality. . . . Destroy inequality of talent and capacity, and life, as we know it, stops. . . . The corner-stone of Democracy is natural inequality; its ideal the selection of the most fit. Liberty is far more precious than Equality, and the two are mutually destructive."

Was Equality, as Socialists allege, the rule of society in primitive times? Unquestionably No. Such an idea was too transparently false to be even put forward. Each tribe existed surrounded by enemies. Persons, therefore, of necessity grouped themselves for defence and attack round the strongest and the most intelligent.

In advocating equality of condition the Socialist has recourse to the history of a past which never in fact existed. The main ideas are for the most part borrowed from Rousseau.

"All men are equal by nature and before the law."

"Nothing," rightly observes M. Emile Faguet, "is more false than the first portion of this formula." If under Socialism Equality is to be maintained, individuality must necessarily be ruthlessly suppressed.

As the late poet laureate wrote:—

"Envy wears the mask of love, and, laughing sober fact to scorn, 
Cries to weakest as to strongest,' Ye are equals, equal-born.' 
Equal-born? Oh yes, if yonder hill be level with the flat. 
Charm us, Orator, till the Lion look no larger than the Cat.

A Hundred Year Old Pamphlet on the Failure of the Minimum Wage

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THE HISTORIC KALEIDOSCOPE OF MINIMUM WAGE LEGISLATION by Merchants and Manufacturers of Massachusetts 1916  

THERE has been an astonishing lack of available information in the United States concerning the statutory Minimum Wage, its origin, its history and its practical results. The two great classes of Americans who are closest to the scene of action (the employer and the employee) know the least about it. It is a common picture at hearings in almost any of the states where Minimum Wage Laws are proposed to be enacted to find the proponents and advocates of the bill made up either wholly or preponderantly of men and women whose livelihood is largely derived from service in this or that "social welfare" organization, theorists on sociology, an occasional college professor, and, finally, a large proportion of well-to-do women whose sympathetic tendencies far outweigh their analytical grasp of the laws underlying the business and economic relations of mankind. It is rare, indeed, to find any of these advocates numbered among those classes of society whose social and economic welfare is really bound up in the weekly pay roll of factory and shop, whether as owner or as worker. Except theoretically, an increase in wage standards, or, on the other hand, the impairment of a great industry through hampering laws, means relatively nothing to most of these advocates. Therefore, to them, the picture of a concourse of happy, prosperous workers, emancipated from worry and care through a simple decree of the legislature, is naturally an alluring and pleasing one. We, too, wish that the economic problems of humanity were as easily solved, and with as little sacrifice.

The result is, that ninety-nine per cent of employers first learn of this new burden when the Minimum Wage inspector appears in the factory office and demands certain information contained only in the private books of the concern. The employer suddenly realizes that from this demand to examine his pay roll and other records, to a ruthless overhauling of his dividends, and profit and loss account, is but a single step.

Similarly, the employee—she, in the majority of cases, has never heard of the law until it is in full swing. In known instances, when fully informed of the probable effect of the law upon her future prospects and her co-workers, if given an opportunity, she has voted against its acceptance by her employer. The reasons for this are set forth in detail later on in the story. Read them carefully. In other words, the women workers affected by the Minimum Wage Law were not its original advocates, nor are they to-day as a class for it in anything but an indifferent sense. All the higher paid, more efficient workers dread its levelling effect; while the inefficient fears discharge, and she has good cause to fear this in Massachusetts.

It is well known that from the beginning of industrial development, dating far back into the Roman era, wages and the determination of wages have almost without exception been a matter of private contract. The intangible but none the less certain economic law of supply and demand fixed the general terms of wage schedules. Employer and employee have alike bowed to this law because every infringement of it has brought terrible rebukes to industry, no matter how rosy colored or subtle the theories advanced by various agitators for its evasion. There have been several unsuccessful attempts to fix not only a Minimum Wage but also a Maximum Wage during the last two thousand years, especially by the Romans in the first five Christian centuries. As near as can be learned these attempts, which at first were to fix Maximum Wages, all succumbed to the silent working of the economic law. In the Middle Ages, in the countries of western and southwestern Europe, the same attempt was made, and in England in 1349 A.D., under the statute of Edward III, maximum wages were decreed, owing to the scarcity of labor caused by pestilence, and the consequent exorbitant demands of the workers. This again worked badly, caused much injustice to the skilled workers themselves, and was overturned. In all these attempts the skilled workers and the inefficient suffered most. In the reign of Elizabeth a Minimum Wage Law was enacted, and for a long period state regulation was the popular means of meeting economic inequalities. Until these regulations were repealed chaos reigned in British economic circles. After their repeal the status of labor began to improve. On this point note the statement of Mr. George Howell, an advocate of Trades-Unionism and a member of the British Parliament. He speaks of the two hundred and fifty year period beginning with Elizabeth, and his statement is deserving of much weight. It is as follows:

"The state having once more entered upon the wild-goose chase of attempting to regulate labor, thereby restraining the development of the individual in the pursuit of his own welfare, it found no halting place. As new industries arose, the law had to be extended. Each fresh discovery and invention was more or less handicapped in its application to industry. Capital was fettered, employers were harassed and hampered, and manufacturers were impeded by such laws, and worse than all, they afforded but scant protection to the workmen. It so happened, however, that the latter sought to perpetuate them, because they feared that by repeal they would fare worse than under the law. The capitalists and employers, on the contrary, sought their repeal, and for about two centuries the contest raged fiercer and fiercer on the one side for the retention of the laws, and on the other for their repeal. . . . But there was no halting place. Finis was nowhere written at the end of any chapter. . . . Industry groaned under the weight of regulation, restriction and control. There was a revolt against it, first by one party and then by the other, as it suited them, or as the nature of the industry demanded. It almost looked at one period as if the whole trade of the country would be crushed beneath the load of legislation; and it would have been, had not other countries been simply stupid as regards the same kind of legislation, or at least such legislation as compassed nearly the same ends."

Regarding the present agitation to return to this policy, Mr. Howell says:

"If a cure for this frenzy be possible, probably the best cure will be a careful perusal of the legislation prior to the commencement of the present century, and a careful study of its effect. It nearly killed our early trade, and nearly starved our people. It needs no prophet to foretell that the same result would follow if such laws were re-enacted."

Careful study of this part of English economic history will convince any fair-minded man that state intervention in the mysterious region of wages and wage-fixing has never brought other than temporary relief, and that the eventual distress resulting from such entanglements has been terrible in the extreme.

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