Category: Economics

It’s not cricketIt’s not cricket

“When you are up against the enemy in close combat, you want smoking boots on the other end. You don’t want a fair fight.” – Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster Jr., U.S. Army Capabilities Integration Center

Or for the furtherance of profit or oppressionOr for the furtherance of profit or oppression

“The law is nothing more than a means to a social end and should never, for all the law schools and law firms in the world, be treated as an end in itself.” – Fred Rodell, Yale Law School, “Goodbye to Law Reviews”

In my profession, we call it ‘extortion by lawsuit’In my profession, we call it ‘extortion by lawsuit’

“Defamation actions have not infrequently been brought—or jury verdicts have been rendered, irrespective of the plaintiff’s motivation in bringing the action—not to compensate for actual pecuniary loss or to vindicate the plaintiff, but instead to cudgel the defendant and to mulct him for substantial damages that may be like a windfall to the plaintiff.” – Kenneth S. Abraham and Albert Clark Tate, Jr., compilers, A Concise Restatement of Torts

Call me luckyCall me lucky

“I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.” – Ecclesiastes 9:11

Such as tossing a few overboard or underbusSuch as tossing a few overboard or underbus

“No great country was ever saved by good men, because good men will not go to the lengths that may be necessary.” – Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, “Letter to the Countess of Ossory”

It has close contendersIt has close contenders

“Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.” – Winston Churchill, The River War

Coincidental that it is Good FridayCoincidental that it is Good Friday

“Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today.” – Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

Writing for the streetlamp at midnightWriting for the streetlamp at midnight

“When I speak at a conference, there’s generally somebody sitting in the front row who raises a hand and says, ‘I don’t need a big advance. I don’t need a publisher that’s going to send me on a national tour’—which is good because nobody is going to do that—‘but I just want to be published.’ That’s wrong. You want to be read. Writers need to understand the distinction between wanting to be published and what they really want. Publication is a means to an end. And the end is being read. If you’re looking to get credit, there are easier ways to get credit. But if you feel genuinely that you could make a promise to a reader, and that what you have to say is worth somebody you’ve never met and may have nothing in common with spending ten hours of their time on, that’s the goal.” – Jennifer Joel (interviewed by Michael Szczerban in Poets & Writers (emphases in original))

StokesStokes

“Prison is nothing. Prison only makes hatred.” – Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

Simple statement of historical factSimple statement of historical fact

“All contractors involved in the production of U.S. war materials were barred from practicing racial discrimination.” – Robert Goralski, “May 27, 1943,” World War II Almanac: 1931-1945

It was near to time for torches and pitchforksIt was near to time for torches and pitchforks

“ ‘We are at the end of our rope,’ Hoover remarked to an aide late on the evening of March 3 [1932]. And so it seemed might also be the country. Here and there in the midwestern farm regions, armed groups effectively prevented foreclosure sales. In Iowa, the Farmers’ Holiday Association sporadically blocked shipments of produce to market. In some cities, laid-off utility workers tapped electric lines to restore power to homes that had failed to pay their bills. There were scattered reports of groups invading supermarkets and appropriating supplies of food without paying.” – Alonzo L. Hamby, For the Survival of Democracy

No consolation in that prizeNo consolation in that prize

“The essential purpose of a contract between commercial people is actual performance—they do not bargain merely for a promise, or for a promise plus the right to win a lawsuit.” – Bradford Stone and Kristen David Adams, Uniform Commercial Code in a Nutshell

You got what you wanted, now what do you want?You got what you wanted, now what do you want?

“A controversy exists when the plaintiff wants more, or different, relief than the defendant is willing to provide. If A says that B has caused an injury of $100,000, and B offers $110,000 in recompense, A cannot spurn the offer and sue for $100,000. Once the defendant offers to satisfy the plaintiff’s entire demand, there is no dispute over which to litigate and no controversy to resolve. In other words, you cannot persist in suing after you’ve won.” – Judge Frank A. Easterbrook, Smith v. Greystone Alliance, LLC (internal cites and quotations omitted)

It fills my to-do listIt fills my to-do list

“They say I’m lazy, but it takes all my time.” – Joe Walsh, “Life’s Been Good”

Hail, BritanniaHail, Britannia

“An Englishman’s duty is to secure for himself for ever, reasonable clothing, a clean shirt a day, a couple of mutton chops grilled without condiments, two floury potatoes, an apple pie with a piece of Stilton and pulled bread, a pint of Club médoc, a clean room, in the winter a good fire in the grate, a comfortable armchair, a comfortable woman to see that all these were prepared for you, and to keep you warm in bed and to brush your bowler and fold your umbrella in the morning. When you had that secure for life you could do what you liked provided that what you did never endangered that security.” – Ford Madox Ford, The Last Post

But where’s the profit in it?But where’s the profit in it?

“This was the war of attrition. . . . A mug’s game! A mug’s game as far as killing men was concerned, but not an uninteresting occupation if you considered it as a struggle of various minds spread all over the broad landscape in the sunlight. They did not kill many men and they expended an infinite number of missiles and a vast amount of thought. If you took six million men armed with loaded canes and stockings containing bricks or knives and set them against another six million men similarly armed, at the end of three hours four million on the one side and the entire six million on the other would be dead. So, as far as killing went, it really was a mug’s game. That was what happened if you let yourself get into the hands of the applied scientist. For all these things were the products not of the soldier but of hirsute, bespectacled creatures who peered through magnifying glasses. Or of course, on our side, they would be shaven-cheeked and less abstracted. They were efficient as slaughterers in that they enabled the millions of men to be moved. When you had only knives you could not move very fast. On the other hand, your knife killed at every stroke: you could set a million men firing at each other with rifles from eighteen hundred yards. But few rifles ever registered a hit. So the invention was relatively inefficient. And it dragged things out! And suddenly it had become boring.” – Ford Madox Ford, A Man Could Stand Up— (ellipsis in original)

We play the lottery to benefit the fundWe play the lottery to benefit the fund

“There was a period in my life when I was spending time among great sleight-of-hand men, card magicians, in Las Vegas, and one of them slipped me a guide to card cheating that had been privately printed by a professional card cheat. (Card magic and card cheating are Siamese twins, and no great card magician has not flirted with fiddling his neighbours).

It was a sour piece of work, but it taught me something vital. Since a card cheat can only cheat effectively on his own deal, unless he has the cards marked (hard to do) the rest of the time he has to just play smart, and this means fully internalising, as instant reflexes, all the statistical probabilities of card playing. I recall the cheater’s insistent formula about these odds, almost his precise words, with indecent clarity: If the odds on whatever it might be—say, drawing to an inside straight—are 10-to-one, you’ll see it this week; if it’s 100-to-one, you won’t see it this week, but you will see it this year. If it’s 1000-to-one you won’t see it this year, but you will probably see it once. Anything more than that—10,000-to-one, 100,000-to-one—you’re never going to see at the card table. It’s just never going to happen. Yeah, but it will happen, to someone you say! Someone draws an inside straight. Yeah, he said, but you won’t.” – Adam Gopnik, “A Point of View: Four Types of Anxiety and How to Cure Them”

We are all amateurs hereWe are all amateurs here

“If every day and all day long you chatter at high pitch and with the logic an lucidity of the Frenchman; if you shout in self-assertion, with your hat on your stomach, bowing from a stiff spine and by implication threaten all day long to shoot your interlocutor, like the Prussian; if you are as lachrymally emotional as the Italian, or as drily and epigrammatically imbecile over unessentials as the American, you will have a noisy, troublesome, and thoughtless society without any of the surface calm that should distinguish the atmosphere of men when they are together. You will never have deep arm-chairs in which to sit for hours in clubs thinking of nothing at all—or of the off-theory in bowling. On the other hand, in the face of death — except at sea, by fire, railway accident or accidental drowning in rivers; in the face of madness, passion, dishonour or—and particularly—prolonged mental strain, you will have all the disadvantage of the beginner at any game and may come off very badly indeed. Fortunately death, love, public dishonour and the like are rare occurrences in the life of the average man, so that the great advantage would seem to have lain with English society; at any rate before the later months of the year 1914.” – Ford Madox Ford, Some Do Not…

A classic no-brainerA classic no-brainer

“The beneficial effect of doubling the home market for our industry by the simple expedient of higher wages for all employees marked the opening of new vistas of prosperity if not the birth of a vast new economic concept.” – Hugh Johnson to John J. Pershing, September 28, 1930

Serf’s up! Grab your waterboards!Serf’s up! Grab your waterboards!

“A country is not only what it does—it is what it puts up with, what it tolerates.” – Kurt Tucholsky (trans. Gordon A. Craig, Germany 1866-1945)

It was not entirely calculatedIt was not entirely calculated

“The origins of the annihilation of the German Jews were much more remote in time than the events of Krystallnacht. They are to be found in popular reactions to the dislocations that accompanied Germany’s belated but headlong rise as an industrial Power in the nineteenth century and in the growth of a virulent form of racist anti-Semitism in the Wilhelmine period, which remained latent until military defeat and economic collapse turned it into a potent rallying-cry for the rightist fanatics and demagogues who led the attack upon the Weimar constitution. The most gifted of these, Adolf Hitler, was also the one most obsessed with hatred and fear of the Jews.” – Gordon A. Craig, Germany 1866-1945

So cut it outSo cut it out

“In war all repetitions are perilous. You can do many things with impunity if you do not keep on doing them over and over again.” – Winston Churchill, The World Crisis

This is why little gets doneThis is why little gets done

“The ability to wait while conditions develop is a requisite of practical policy.” – Otto von Bismarck, Die gesammelten Werke (trans. Craig)

And so they bet it all, and so they lostAnd so they bet it all, and so they lost

“The world on the verge of its catastrophe was very brilliant. Nations and Empires crowned with princes and potentates rose majestically on every side, lapped in the accumulated treasures of the long peace. All were fitted and fastened—it seemed securely—into an immense cantilever. The two mighty European systems faced each other glittering and clanking in their panoply, but with a tranquil gaze. A polite, discreet, pacific, and on the whole sincere diplomacy spread its web of connections over both. A sentence in a dispatch, an observation by an ambassador, a cryptic phrase in a Parliament seemed sufficient to adjust from day to day the balance of the prodigious structure. Words counted, and even whispers. A nod could be made to tell. Were we after all to achieve world security and universal peace by a marvellous system of combinations in equipoise and of armaments in equation, of checks and counter-checks on violent action ever more complex and more delicate ? Would Europe thus marshalled, thus grouped, thus related, unite into one universal and glorious organism capable of receiving and enjoying in undreamed of abundance the bounty which nature and science stood hand in hand to give? The old world in its sunset was fair to see. But there was a strange temper in the air. Unsatisfied by material prosperity the nations turned restlessly towards strife internal or external. National passions, unduly exalted in the decline of religion, burned beneath the surface of nearly every land with fierce if shrouded fires. Almost one might think the world wished to suffer. Certainly men were everywhere eager to dare.” – Winston Churchill, The World Crisis

I dunno, maybe because people are stupidI dunno, maybe because people are stupid

“The First World War is a mystery. Its origins are mysterious. So is its course. Why did a prosperous continent, at the height of its success as a source and agent of global wealth and power and at one of the peaks of its intellectual and cultural achievement, choose to risk all it had won for itself and all it offered to the world in the lottery of a vicious and local internecine conflict? Why, when the hope of bringing the conflict to a quick and decisive conclusion was everywhere dashed to the ground within months of its outbreak, did the combatants decide nevertheless to persist in their military effort, to mobilise for total war and eventually to commit the totality of their young manhood to mutual and existentially pointless slaughter?” – John Keegan, The First World War

The evil of the wealthy is hereby deemed of benefit to allThe evil of the wealthy is hereby deemed of benefit to all

“It is a harsh doctrine, that men grow wicked in proportion as they improve and enlighten their minds. Experience has by no means justified us in the supposition, that there is more virtue in one class of men than in another. Look through the rich and the poor of the community; the learned and the ignorant.—Where does virtue predominate? The difference indeed consists, not in the quantity but kind of vices, which are incident to the various classes; and here the advantage of character belongs to the wealthy. Their vices are probably more favorable to the prosperity of the state, than those of the indigent; and they partake less of moral depravity.” – Alexander Hamilton, June 21, 1788 (quoted in Debate on the Constitution, Part Two, ed. Bailyn)

Maybe… maybe notMaybe… maybe not

“The most damnable thing in the world is a servile copyist!” – Admiral John Fisher (quoted by Winston Churchill in The World Crisis)

Take two aspirin and call me in the morningTake two aspirin and call me in the morning

“It is customary for thoughtless people to jeer at the old diplomacy and to pretend that wars arise out of its secret machinations. When one looks at the petty subjects which have led to wars between great countries and to so many disputes, it is easy to be misled in this way. Of course such small matters are only the symptoms of the dangerous disease, and are only important for that reason. Behind them lie the interests, the passions and the destiny of mighty races of men; and long antagonisms express themselves in trifles. ‘Great commotions,’ it was said of old, ‘arise out of small things, but not concerning small things.’ The old diplomacy did its best to render harmless the small things: it could not do more. Nevertheless, a war postponed may be a war averted. Circumstances change, combinations change, new groupings arise, old interests are superseded by new. Many quarrels that might have led to war have been adjusted by the old diplomacy of Europe and have, in Lord Melbourne’s phrase, ‘blown over.’ If the nations of the world, while the sense of their awful experiences is still fresh upon them, are able to devise broader and deeper guarantees of peace and build their houses on a surer foundation of brotherhood and interdependence, they will still require the courtly manners, the polite and measured phrases, the imperturbable demeanour, the secrecy and discretion of the old diplomatists of Europe.” – Winston Churchill, The World Crisis

Join the union while you may, don’t wait till your dying day, for that may not be far awayJoin the union while you may, don’t wait till your dying day, for that may not be far away

“For unskilled and unorganized labour, working conditions matched the slums. At the Shawfield Chemical Works in Glasgow in 1897, year of the Diamond Jubilee, workmen received 3d. or 4d. an hour for a twelve-hour day, seven days a week, spent amid poisonous vapors without a lunch-hour rest. They ate lunch standing at the furnaces and if they took Sunday off were fined the next day’s wages. Lord Overtoun, owner of the Works, a philanthropist who gave ℒ 10,000 a year to charity, was a leading member of the Sunday Observance and Sunday Rest Societies. In other industries workers could be arrested for taking a day off without permission. If they applied for it, the request could be refused; if they took it anyway they could be, and often were, hauled off to a day in gaol. Skilled workers organized in England’s craft unions, the oldest in Europe, were better off. Numbering about one-fifth of all adult male workers, a larger proportion than in any other country, they had their own insurance and pension systems backed by large funds and they benefited from lower prices in their own cooperatives. Nevertheless, vis-à-vis capital, they were still on the defensive and the dark persistent presence of unemployment at their backs made them vulnerable.” – Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower

All the children left behindAll the children left behind

“In the slums people lived three to a bedroom of 700 cubic feet or, with children, eight and nine in a space of 1,200 cubic feet. Vermin lived with them, a piece of paper on the floor served as a toilet, fish on Sundays was the weekly protein for a family of eight, at two and a half ounces per portion. Children were stunted and pale, with rotting teeth, and if they went to school, sat dully at their desks or fell asleep. Ignorance and apathy as much as ill health were poverty’s product; the slums were sloughs of wasted lives.” – Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower