Muhammad Quotes

Brandeis was U. S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1856-1941, who wrote that competition would control prices if only healthy competition could be maintained—the problem was resolved by both increasing competition and much more stringent regulation of corporations.

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.

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.

Professor Epstein is a libertarian free market economist who advocates patience even if there are clear problems like corruption, unsafe working conditions, and the like. This view holds that the free market will sort itself out more effectively than the government will be able to do. Others, disagree.

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.

She was then the European Commissioner for Competition

Manava Dharma Shastra. Ancient Hindu India had what may well have been the most regulated mercantile economy of any society in history. All prices for all goods were to be set by the king. In order to prevent the stultifying effect of price controls, the Hindus required that the prices be reset very frequently to reflect various market conditions. It was a highly regulated form of capitalism. This text is a part of the Hindu Holy Texts. Hindus believe that Manu was a prophet whose text is revealed or inspired.