George Soros Quotes

He and others believe that no matter what regulatioms government officials might impose, Wall Street, the banks and financeers will find a way around the reulations.

The prime minister had a political and philosophical position that government should not interfere with or set or control pricing in the economy. However, a scandal broke out involving payday lending—short term lending the working class does to tide them over till pay day if they run out of money. Lenders were charging huge interest rates beyond anything that is conscionable. Cameron’s government placed controls on interest rates and other facets of that industry as they might have lost a vote of confidence in Parliament had they not acted. He was then questioned about the hypocrisy involved in his regulation, and he gave this amazing quotation, which was the classic reason for government price controls on the private sector that had been given by the Labor Party opponents for years. This also distressed extreme conservatives, who argue that market controls are always preferable to government controls.

TR came from a wealthy, upper class family, and because of his position favoring regulation of corporations he was called a traitor to his class by many.

Mises observes the classic philosophical quandary of business and commerce. If we cannot leave everything to the market place and the capitalists and entrepreneurs because they are morally and ethically fallible, will not the government people who regulate and control them be equally moral and fallible? Mises critics point out that Mises misses the difference in a democracy, that if fallible businessmen err, all can suffer and their personal vested interests do not necessarily coincide with the interests of the majority in general. If the government representative of the majority are fallible and err, the majority can correct them and if the majority does not, the people have undone themselves and have not been the victims of the foibles of a few privileged people in the society. Mises argues that it is the minority who, if left alone, would produce the best standard of living for the majority who should exercise they right to regulation only by their acts as consumers.

Some economic conservatives see little or no role for government. For many of them, in a free market there is no role for government. This quotation, from one of the economic heroes of the conservatives, shows that he not only saw a role for government, but believed that government was essential to the operation of a free market.

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.

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.

Whenever price controls have been tried, there always seems to develop a black market. However, some argue that price controls can work very well for a modest period of time in a national emergency and give WWII as an example. Although there was a black market, very few Americans participated in it, and the effect was positive as a result of the patriotism that was so keenly felt by most Americans at that time. Further, capital punishment has rarely worked to prevent any illegal activity. In London, pickpockets were publicly hung while other pickpockets fleeced the crowd watching the hanging ostensibly to dissuade people from pickpocketing.

This was a very important quotation because Cox was a strong advocate of deregulation and voluntary regulation, and that is why he was appointed to head the SEC by George W. Bush. He was the leading Republican expert on Regulation of the Stock Markets and sale of public securities. However when the Meltdown of 2008 hit, it was clear to all but the extreme ideologues that some Federal regulation was necessary. Nonetheless, it took several years to reform the regulations for the financial industry with the Banks and Wall Street fighting it all the way and by that time the Republican Party had been so dominated by ideological conservatives that the views of Cox and others no longer had much influence. They fought the Dodd-Frank reforms to go preserve self regulation to a great extent.

in the Meltdown of 2008 Gramm was one of the most ideological deregulators in Congress. As the Meltdown of 2008 hit, he immediately made this statement when few people even knew the extent of what had happened, much less why it happened. Gramm’s instant absolution of deregulation as one of the causes is a classic case of denial. There were few economic issues of controversy that did not contribute to the totality of causes. And a few years later Gramm was one of the very few ideologues who still believed that deregulation did not have a role in the Meltdown and the Great Recession that followed. For a contrast from the expert in his own party, see {638023}.

She was then the European Commissioner for Competition