Robert Hass Quotes

Commerce, trade and exchange make other people more valuable alive than dead, and mean that people try to anticipate what the other guy needs and wants. It engages the mechanisms of reciprocal altruism, as the evolutionary biologists call it, as opposed to raw dominance.

Within a market, organizations have interests distinct from and often antagonistic to the market processes that produced and sustain them.

The free market is the most efficient for utilizing resources and responding to needs, but there are many human needs which find no place on the market.

Capitalism places every man in competition with his fellows for a share of the available wealth. A few people accumulate big piles, but most do not. The sense of community falls victim to this struggle.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

Man, an animal that makes bargains.

The basic rule of free enterprise: You must give in order to get.

All you now do is pursue your private objectives within society. Instead of us being a community, everybody is asked to seek their own personal ends. It's called competition. And competition is antagonism.

The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.

A society that is all self-interest and no comradeship is not a society at all. But a society that is all comradeship and no self-interest is also not a society; it is a sect - or, on the largest scale, totalitarianism.

Capitalism is economic Darwinism…free enterprise is code for individualistic amorality…the marketplace is the temple of secular humanism.

The school of laissez faire, of which you seem to be a pronounced advocate, has produced great men in advocating the theory of each for himself, and his Satanic Majesty taking the hindermost

Although capitalism is, in principle, strongly individualistic, it has contributed in practice to reinforce the trend to integration, because it has made our lives more and more interdependent.

The essential quality of a market system is not that it promotes greed, but that it renders greed harmless.

What America needs is not Robin Hood but Adam Smith.

The market economy succeeds not because some people's interests are suppressed and other people are kept out of the market, but because people gain individual advantage from it.

I live my life through the prism of capitalism and physiological limits and eventualities.

For traditional societies … the collective, the group, is more important than the individual, and empowering the individual is equated with dividing the society.

Free enterprise and the market economy mean war; socialism and planned economy mean peace. We must plan civilization or we must perish.

There are needs and common goods that cannot be satisfied by the market system.

The free market economy provides an unparalleled example of a continuing healthy circulation of elites. In this dynamic economy, failure to keep up with competitors, failure to satisfy the demands of consumers in the best possible way, will topple elites quickly and establish new ones who do the job better.

Global markets are the best way to allocate resources efficiently but not to do it fairly.

Competition—ruthless, unforgiving, to-the-death competition—is a crucial feature of capitalism.

Self interest is a masterful agent in modern civilization.

There is no such thing as society…There are individuals, men and women, and there are families.