Friedrich List Quotes
It is bad policy to regulate everything... where things may better regulate themselves and can be better promoted by private exertions; but it is no less bad policy to let those things alone which can only be promoted by interfering social power.
List, Friedrich. Outlines of American Political Economy. Samuel Parker, 1827, p. 15.
The mantra was not heard much after the collapse of the ‘smart’ markets in 2008 and the ‘dumb’ governments had to come to the rescue of the economy all over the industrialized world.
This rigid view left no room for regulation which is what almost every modern industrial democracy has chosen. To some of his extremist followers, any government regulation of business or the economy whatsoever, regardless of how little, means that the nation has embraced socialism. It is in this sense that many extreme right wingers viewed Presidents like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama as socialists while they saw themselves as opponents of socialism.
There were a number of hyper conservatives at the time who actually believed this. They either tend to ignore for ideological reasons, the incredible role that local, state, and the Federal government has played in many of the great innovations in our nation. It was a Federal Contract that allowed Eli Whitney to develop the technique of manufacturing with interchangeable parts. The Erie Canal, the greatest and most innovative engineering project in the world at the time was built by the New York State government with State money, It was a Abraham Lincoln Federal contract that produced the research to make the telegraph feasible. Under Theodore Roosevelt, a Federal Government grant made it possible to control Yellow Fever. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had the Army and the Treasure Department fund and operate the Manhattan project which not only developed the atomic bomb but also innovated the tools and methods for nuclear energy production. Most of the early computer programs in America were written by Government employees or by people who were working under government contracts. It was the Army that not only financed but also provided key staff in DARPA which produced the Internet. The Decoding of the Human Genome was the joint innovation of a private group and a Research Laboratory of the National Institutes of Health, and the majority of medical innovations (including pharmaceuticals) in the last 50 years were produced by Government Scientists or Financed by Government Agencies. There are literally thousands of others, a;; of which must be ignored to claim that Government curtails innovation. There has also been a great deal of important innovation that has occurred by independent individuals and private companies without the help of government. The great innovative success of America has been because both the private and public sectors, sometimes working independently and sometimes together has produced a steady production of important innovations that are the envey of the world.
Georg Friedrich List was a German-American economist who developed the "National System" of political economy. He was a forefather of the German historical school of economics, and argued for the German Customs Union from a Nationalist standpoint. He advocated imposing tariffs on imported goods while supporting free trade of domestic goods, and stated the cost of a tariff should be seen as an investment in a nation's future productivity.
