Jeffery Birnbaum Quotes

Like any business, the oil industry runs on the basic premise of supply and demand. The more supply - the lower the price. The higher the demand - the higher price. In other words, the more people who can buy oil, the higher the price of oil.

The difficulty lies, not in finding a producer, but in finding a consumer.

Supply creates its own demand

The price of every thing rises and falls from time to time and place to place; and with every such change the purchasing power of money changes so far as that thing goes.

Let the king fix the rates for the purchase and sale of all marketable goods, having duly considered whence they come, whither they go, how long they have been kept, the probable profit and the probable outlay. Once in five nights, or at the close of each fortnight, let the king publicly settle the prices for the merchants.

We have learned that the various schools of [economic] thought all have important elements of truth in them. But none of them is by itself a sufficient explanation of what goes on in the economy.

We shall find as we go on with the war and its increasing economic disruption, that first one commodity then another will need to be taken under control... So long as demand and supply have free play in a commodity we had best leave it alone. Our attention to the break in normal economic control in other commodities must be designed to repair the break, not to set up new economic systems or theories.

The opinions that the price of commodities depends solely on the proportion of supply and demand, or demand to supply, has become almost an axiom in political economy, and has been the source of much error.

… governments must serve capitalism by establishing and maintain a framework which enables capitalism to develop. It can induce it to grow, but cannot command it to do so.

The law of supply and demand holds eternal.

Supply can create its own demand.

In stating the principles which regulate exchangeable value and price, we should carefully distinguish between those variations which belong to the commodity itself, and those which are occasioned by a variation in the medium in which value is estimated, or price expressed.

We propose in the following Treatise to give an outline of the Science which treats of the Nature, the Production, and the Distribution of Wealth. To that Science we give the name of Political Economy.

Goods move in response to price differences from points of low to points of higher price, the movement tending to obliterate the price difference and come to rest.

Start with the idea that you can't repeal the laws of economics. Even if they are inconvenient.

Discovering various economists, economic works, reading financial periodicals and keeping up on current events in geopolitics and economics around the world opened my eyes to many facets of how the extended order works.

But in the free market system, you're forced to change.

But while I loved all of these courses, there was an irresistible attraction of economics.

The conservative argument is that the economy is like the weather, that it just operates automatically.

I strongly believe that for the steel prices to be market-driven, without distortions, we need to substantially increase the production capacity.

Supply always comes on the heels of demand.

The economy controls the politicians far more than the politicians control the economy.

It is no longer a matter of serious controversy whether the government should play a positive role in helping to maintain a high level of economic activity. What we debate nowadays is not the need for controlling business cycles, but rather the nature of governmental action, its timing and its extent.

What we may call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.

Commerce is the greatest of all political interests.