Category: Economics

“They well deserve to have that know the strong’st and surest way to get.” – William Shakespeare, The Life and Death of King Richard II 3.3

“Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail, and say, there is no sin but to be rich; and being rich, my virtue then shall be, to say, there is no vice but beggary.” – William Shakespeare, The Life and Death of King John 2.1

“Our purses shall be proud, our garments poor; for ‘tis the mind that makes the body rich; and as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds, so honour peereth in the meanest habit.” – William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, 4.3

“Nothing comes amiss, so money comes withal.” – William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, 1.2

“No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en.” – William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, 1.1

“It cannot be stressed enough that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.” – Zbigniew Brzezenski (quoted by Tim Judah in “Ukraine on the Brink”)

“We used to make shit in this country. Built shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.” – David Simon and George Pelecanos, “Bad Dreams,” The Wire

“The one irredeemable error of a supply program is not too much, but too little.” – “Report of War Department Procurement Review Board” (quoted in Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945)

“A man is master of his liberty; time is their master; and, when they see time, they’ll go or come.” – William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors

“Foul cankering rust the hidden treasure frets, but gold that’s put to use more gold begets.” – William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis

“Every defect in a man, and in others’ way of taking him, our agreement that gold has value gives us power to rise above.” – Regina Corrado, “Unauthorized Cinnamon”, Deadwood

“No man is called happy till his death, and all the taxes at his wake and funeral paid.” – Ovid, The Metamorphoses, Book III, “Cadmus” (trans. Horace Gregory)

“True power does not need arrogance, a long beard and a barking voice. True power strangles you with silk ribbons, charm, and intelligence.” – Oriana Fallaci (as quoted by Slavoj Žižek in First As Tragedy, Then As Farce)

“There is no such thing as a neutral market: in every particular situation, market configurations are always regulated by political decisions. The true dilemma is thus not ‘Should the state intervene?’ but ‘What kind of state intervention is necessary?’” – Slavoj Žižek, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce

“Russia is basically a millennium-long project of colonizing the vast expanses of Great Russian plains, Siberia and Far East. Our economic foundation has always been extracting natural resources from these lands and selling them to our neighbors.” – Dima Vorobiev (propaganda executive for the Soviet Union, 1980–1991), “Why was the Soviet Union behind in computer science compared to USA?”

“The government’s greatest power to change the landscape isn’t with bulldozing or bombs, it’s the ability to transform nature into squares, with a simple stroke of the pen.” – Noah Caldwell-Gervais, The Lincoln Highway: Across America on the First Transcontinental Motor Route

“Sometimes I’m grateful that no one uses my washcloth. And that I can go to the store and buy brand new sponges at any time . . .” – Lydia Davis, “March, Excerpts from a Journal, January to June, 1997 ” (ellipsis and emphasis in original)

“To work for crumbs or to keep from the lash says maybe a slave’s what you are.” – David Milch and Regina Corrado, “I Am Not the Fine Man You Take Me For,” Deadwood

“No nation is rich enough or productive enough to supply and maintain battlefronts where there is no longer a battle.” – War Department “Reports on Overseas Construction” (quoted by Richard M. Leighton and Robert W. Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy: 1940-1943)

“During the first nineteen months of its participation in World War II, the U.S. Army purchased almost 950,000 trucks, nineteen times the number it had procured during the corresponding period of World War I. From Pearl Harbor to V-J Day it procured for its own and Allied forces some 84,000 tanks, 2.2 million trucks, 6.2 million rifles, 350,000 artillery pieces, .5 billion rounds of ground artillery ammunition, 41 billion rounds of small arms ammunition. It shipped overseas 127 million measurement tons of cargo, and 7.3 million troops and other passengers.” – Richard M. Leighton and Robert W. Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy: 1940-1943

“Any politician should be put in jail who votes for an appropriation bill and fails to vote the tax to pay for it.” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.

“The early Christians were (in the strictly technical sense) communists, as the book of Acts quite explicitly states. If these are indeed the Last Days, as James says—if everything is now seen in the light of final judgment—then storing up possessions for ourselves is the height of imprudence. And I imagine this is also why subsequent generations of Christians have not, as a rule, been communists: the Last Days are in fact taking quite some time to elapse, and we have families to raise in the meantime.” – Richard Bentley Hart, “Introduction” to The New Testament: A Translation (emphasis in original)

“At the end of the day, it’s cheaper to be a good person.” – Justin King, “Let’s talk about Tennessee, the ACLU, and $500,000 . . .,” February 10, 2024

“An important factor enabling the Soviets to seize the offensive and retain it is Lend-Lease. Lend-Lease food and transport particularly have been vital factors in Soviet success. Combat aircraft, upon which the Soviet Air Forces relied so greatly, have been furnished in relatively great numbers (11,300 combat planes received). Should there be a full stoppage it is extremely doubtful whether Russia could retain efficiently her all-out offensive capabilities. Even defensively the supply of Lend-Lease food and transport would play an extremely vital role. It amounts to about a million tons a year. If Russia were deprived of it, Germany could probably still defeat the U.S.S.R. Lend-Lease is our trump card in dealing with U.S.S.R. and its control is possibly the most effective means we have to keep the Soviets on the offensive in connection with the second front.” – General George C. Marshall, from a memorandum to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, March 31, 1944

“Arms races are a fact of global life. The first guns had been invented in about 1290, when the Chinese learned how to harness the propulsive powers of gunpowder. Yet the business of armaments grew and prospered much more rapidly in the West than in the East. The reason, William McNeill theorizes, can be summed up in a single word: capitalism. In the market-based economies of the West, there was ample incentive for craftsmen to continuously improve weapons for wealthy and impatient kings. The Chinese, while innovative in the laboratory, lacked the entrepreneurial urge that sparked so much Western achievement. Chinese culture in these early centuries taught that the concentration of too much money in too few private hands was immoral. Gunmakers in the West, bound by no such scruples, got down to work. The perfecting of deadly weapons held the promise of a big payday.” – Julia Keller, Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel

“The surest way to becoming a doctor in the 1840s? Start calling yourself ‘Doctor.’ Indeed, one of the most famous ‘doctors’ of the nineteenth century, the man who made a fortune selling patent medicine, was Lucius S. Comstock of New York. His credentials consisted entirely of having pasted ‘M.D.’ to the end of his name. Later, for good measure, Comstock threw in a bogus law degree, too.” – Julia Keller, Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel

“To the New England mind, roads, schools, clothes, and a clean face were connected as part of the law of order or divine system. Bad roads meant bad morals.” – Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“If a country can be said to possess a soul, then America’s is the patent system: the simple, fair method of staking claim to a new idea and getting the chance to make money from it.” – Julia Keller, Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel

“The wealthy and the powerful aren’t just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different sort of norms and mores. When you go from working-class to professional-class, almost everything about your old life becomes unfashionable at best or unhealthy at worst.” – J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy

“Working as a cashier turned me into an amateur sociologist. A frenetic stress animated so many of our customers. One of our neighbors would walk in and yell at me for the smallest of transgressions—not smiling at her, or bagging the groceries too heavy one day or too light the next. Some came into the store in a hurry, pacing between aisles, looking frantically for a particular item. But others waded through the aisles deliberately, carefully marking each item off of their list. Some folks purchased a lot of canned and frozen food, while others consistently arrived at the checkout counter with carts piled high with fresh produce. The more harried a customer, the more they purchased precooked or frozen food, the more likely they were to be poor. And I knew they were poor because of the clothes they wore or because they purchased their food with food stamps.” – J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy