Thomas Sowell Quotes
Four things have almost invariably followed the imposition of controls to keep prices below the level they would reach under supply and demand in a free market: (1) increased use of the product or service whose price is controlled, (2) Reduced supply of the same product or service, (3) quality deterioration, (4) black markets.
Sowell, Thomas. Basic Economics. Basic Books, 2000.
Abd al-Rahman Ibn Mohammad. He is generally regarded to be the World’s first social scientist. The largest statue in Tunisia of not of a military leader of king, but of this social scientist.
Hoover was the Food Administrator at that time. Although he gave lip service to the free market economy concept, he was proposing government price controls and rationing. When the free market was not functioning, at this time in his career, he was willing to use government controls and regulation. By the end of 1918 over 250,000 food-handling corporations, firms, and individuals were under Food Administration licenses. Meat, fish, poultry, eggs, butter, milk, potatoes, fresh and dried vegetables, and fruits, canned goods, the coarse grains and rice, vegetable oils, coffee, and such various commodities accessory to food-handling, as ice, ammonia (for ice-making), arsenic (for insecticides), jute bags, sisal, etc., were under direct control. Ironically, later when he was President and faced with the Great Depression, he had become much more rigid and would not “interfere” with the free, private market and use government to solve the national problems. It was Franklin Delano Roosevelt who did that after Hoover would not. At the time he gave this speech, Hoover was not very political and was more of a technocrat. It may have been that by the time he became President he was intellectually and politically locked in to Republican Party conservative economic ideology.
To the modern reader utterances such as this from a Conservative Prime Minister seem astounding. However, the Great Depression existed in Canada as well as the United States, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was not the only world leader who would reach the conclusion that business and capitalism must be profoundly regulated and the system changed if it was to be saved.
She was talking about the Soviet Union
This is a very interesting quotation in that right wing parties are usually opposed to any kind of Government ownership and control of business and industry. However, Fascist parties have usually wanted to commandeer business and industry for the central purposes of the dictatorial state. The French National Front Party had its roots in the WWII French Vichy Government—which was allied with the Nazis to bring Fascism and racism to France.
Thomas Sowell is an American economist, social theorist, and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
