William Jennings Bryan Quotes
I insist that the commandment, "Thou shalt not steal," applies as much to the monopolist as to the highwayman.
William Jennings Bryan, 1860-1925, U. S. Secretary of State, U. S. Congressman (Democrat, NB), 3 Time Unsuccessful Democratic Presidential Candidate, Speech, Carnegie Hall, New York City, 1908
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
There were few if any consumer protection laws in those days and many wealthy aristocrats made their money by taking advantage of the poor. They were the landowners, bankers, financiers and often the industrialists. Shaw was a sarcastic social critic and this is a typical line he gave his upper class characters. Today, we have more controls on business and finance, and many wealthy business people have gotten that way by providing great value to the consumers and being honest. However, we still have large numbers of wealthy members of society who do make their money from the poor and middle class by unethical and often illegal means. In the aftermath of the Meltdown of 2008. hundreds of thousands of the homes of the working poor and middle class were foreclosed by the major banks forging the legal documentation for the foreclusures. Millions of consumer contracts are issued that even a PhD cannot understand the terms of without special legal and financial training. There is even a legal definition of a salesperson lying to make a sale which is so commonplace that our law excuses it and calls it "puffing". However, there has been over time, improvement over Shaw's era.
Webster was taking regular bribes from large corporations and even complained when his payments were late. So he might have had a pro-large business bias. At the time taking bribes even if there was a quid pro quo was not illegal or even “unethical” by then Congressional rules.
In 1912 Theodore Roosevelt challenged incumbent President William Howard Taft for the Republican presidential nomination. Roosevelt had the popular support of most Republicans but the Taft regulars had control of the party machinery and the convention being held in Chicago:. The headline appeared on the front page and every other page of the issue.
The Diggers were a religious-economic movement that even today would be considered very radical. They advocated the right of the poor to go onto public lands and farm them—thus the name “Diggers.” Beyond their opposition to the private ownership of land to the exclusion of the poor, Winstanley and the Diggers promulgated another very modern doctrine: That the poor should take the responsibility and have the right to determinine how the society should provide for the poor. A version of this became one of the Mottos of the Poverty Program of 1964. See {616966}.
Most defenders of the Capitalist system that produces large inequities argue that interfering in the free market wouldl be worse. However this thesis argues that the inequality is actually good for the people including those at the low end of the ladder.
The Kimberly and Comstock lodes were natural deposits of copper and silver so close to the surface that it required very little work to remove the metal and sell the it.
At the time, there was generally only a single newspaper in an area in New Zealand.
Railroads and other large markets shared dominated by a few large corporations.
The Virginia Colonial Governor returned to England to protest the economics of the tobacco trade and the monopolies that then prevailed:
William Jennings Bryan was an American orator and politician from Illinois and Nebraska. Beginning in 1896, he emerged as a dominant force in the Democratic Party, running three times as the party's nominee for President of the United States in the 1896, 1900, and 1908 elections. He also served in the United States House of Representatives and as the United States Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson. Because of his faith in the wisdom of the common people, he was often called "The Great Commoner".
