Edmund Ruffin Quotes

Unemployment is 'involuntary' when the price is above its market clearing level. Workers are unemployed because jobs are not available at the prevailing wages, period. The only recourse is to either expand the number of jobs or somehow lower the wage.

Making labor less expensive helps firms hire people.

If workmen become scarce, the manufacturer gives higher wages, but at first requires an encrease of labour; and this is willingly submitted to by the artisan, who can now eat and drink better, to compensate his additional toil and fatigue.

It is not by the absolute quantity of produce obtained by either class, that we can correctly judge of the rate of profit, rent, and wages, but by the quantity of labour required to obtain that produce.

The scientific study of labor economics provided the opportunity for me to unite theory with evidence my lifetime intellectual passion.

Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens.

If food were free, why work?

The government's War on Poverty has transformed poverty from a short-term misfortune into a career choice.

Everything in the world is purchased by labor.

In addition to joblessness, of course, by the working of supply and demand, when you have a larger number of people unemployed, wages do not rise at the normal level, so that we had last year a drop in real wages.

The increase in inequality in income is a longtime trend, but the pressure on middle- and low-income workers is going up rapidly. Especially if they live in an area where there are high housing and gas prices, like California.

If the quantity of labour realized in commodities, regulate their exchangeable value, every increase of the quantity of labour must augment the value of that commodity on which it is exercised, as every diminution must lower it.

There's a foot race between gas bills and paychecks.

A minimum wage leads to higher levels of unemployment.

If you work, you should not be poor.

The middle class is not a fact of nature. It is partly the product of social engineering by the government.

With every increase in the power of production, consumption grew, and the labourer received larger returns for his labour, producing a tendency to immigration.

… immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants. That’s just supply and demand: we’re talking about large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.

I was in charge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So I had some of the most brilliant mathematical statistical minds in the country, who would put together the modern technology, if you like, of understanding the economy and tracking it and trying to influence it.

The economics of life is against the family.

Historically, it has required a combination of favorable employment trends and active government intervention to lower the percentage of people in poverty and raise living standards for the working middle class.

Relative poverty acknowledges that the definition of poverty should move with the times.

Increasing minimum wage doesn't build a stronger economy.

In the 1950s and 1960s, an explosion of great corporate jobs, together with a restricted supply of labor, produced healthy wage growth.

In our own time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit, although there have neither been continuous wars nor epidemics...For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the evil rapidly and insensibly grew.