“As in the past, the costs and risks of the coming phases of the industrial economy were to be socialized, with eventual profits privatized ...”

“If economics were only about profit maximization, it would be just another name for business administration. It is a social discipline, and society has other means of cost accounting besides market prices.”

“Between the Great Depression and the 1970s, private business was viewed with suspicion even in most capitalist economies.Businesses were, so the story goes, seen as anti-social agents whose profit-seeking needed to be restrained for other, supposedly loftier, goals, such as justice, social harmony, protection of the weak and even national glory.”

“Everything predicted by the enemies of banks, in the beginning, is now coming to pass. We are to be ruined now by the deluge of bank paper. It is cruel that such revolutions in private fortunes should be at the mercy of avaricious adventurers, who, instead of employing their capital, if any they have, in manufactures, commerce, and other useful pursuits, make it an instrument to burden all the interchanges of property with their swindling profits, profits which are the price of no useful industry of theirs.”

“A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physicalexertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving thesame goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding courseof action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition ofskill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.”

“There are costs and risks to a program of action, but they are far less than the long range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.”