Thomas Woods Quotes


The Emergency Banking Act reached back in time to amend the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, which had originally been intended to criminalize economic intercourse between American citizens and declared enemies of the United States.


Citations

Woods, Thomas E., Jr. Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse. Regnery Publishing, 2011.

Related Quotes

4 years after the Great Recession where major banks of America needed government bailouts to prevent failure the Administration and Federal Reserve board wanted to increase the capital requirements to increase the safety of the Banks. Essentially the banks would speculate and gamble with depositors’ money. If their investment paid off, there were large profits and bonuses for the executives. If it did not, they ran out of capital as they had very little of their own at risk. The government bailed them out and the executives got their bonuses anyway. The efforts to make the banks speculate with more of their own money were strongly opposed by the banks and bank executives.


Germany had demanded that Belgium allow German troops to cross Belgium to the French frontier. However, King Albert was concerned that this would be a de facto German occupation of Belgium and asked for help. The British tried diplomacy but things were out of anyone’s control and the First World War ensued.


Alibaba—the largest e-commerce company in the world, larger than Amazon.com and eBay put together--had hundreds of millions of on-line Chinese buyers and hundreds of thousands of Chinese retailers. A huge proportion of Chinese retail sales go through Alibaba.


The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau was established over much Conservative opposition in the reforms that were established in the wake of the Meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession. And the Republican Party was critical of everything that it did. The issue of whether or not the Federal government should even have a role in consumer protection was been debated for over a century. This quotation is very ironic in that the first major federal legislation to assist American consumers was pushed though by Republican President Theodore Roosevelt. Over 100 years later, it was the Republican Party that fought to weaken or eliminate Federal efforts. Ryan, the Republican legislative leader, led the effort. Ironically, most businesses agreed with him about the micromanagement as it was they who had to change their modes of operation to comply with CFPB regulation, but the vast majority of consumers did not feel that they were being micromanaged although many agreed that the companies interacting with consumers were certainly being managed much more tightly.


Thomas Woods
Thomas Woods
  • Born: August 1, 1972
  • Nationality: American
  • Profession: Historian

Thomas Ernest Woods Jr. is an American author, historian, and libertarian who is currently a senior fellow at the Mises Institute. Woods is a New York Times Best-Selling author and has published twelve books. He has written extensively on subjects including the history of the United States, Catholicism, contemporary politics, and economics. Although not an economist himself, Woods is a proponent of the Austrian School of economics. He hosts a daily podcast, The Tom Woods Show, and he formerly co-hosted the now defunct Contra Krugman.