John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
The privileged have regularly invited their own destruction with their greed.
Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Age of Uncertainty. Houghton Mifflin, 1977.
Ingersoll was considered to be the greatest orator and political thinker of his day, but his overt atheistic views curtailed his elected political career.
He was warning that the corporations and monopolies were taking advantage of the poor who, if there is not some balance of redress and justice will resort to violence such as the man who just short him. He gave the speech still bleeding with the bullet lodged in his body. He refused to go to a hospital or get medical care until he had finished his speech. See {633076}.
The term “rugged individualism” was used at the time be very conservatives and the very wealthy to describe business leladers with words that had very good public connotations. They argued that it would be undesirable to curtail their individualism that was so important by any government regulations or laws that would limit what the business leaders could do. However, the reality was that these very successful and powerful “rugged individualists” had regimented most everyone else—employees, consumers, and small businessmen who might sell them services or products. To Tugwell, if the wealthy and powerful few had no restrictions on their individualism, there would be precious little individualism for most of society. He sought a balance of regulating the individualism and prerogatives of the few somewhat in order to allow the vast majority of people to be able to have individuality as well.
John Kenneth Galbraith OC, also known as Ken Galbraith, was a Canadian-American economist, diplomat, public official and intellectual. A leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism, his books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s. As an economist, he leaned toward post-Keynesian economics from an institutionalist perspective.
