Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
We legislate against forestalling and monopoly; we would have a common granary for the poor; but the selfishness which hoards thecorn for high prices, is the preventative of famine; and the law of self-preservation is surer policy than any legislation can be.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Conduct of Life. Ticknor and Fields, 1860, p. 89.
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.
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.
The first part of this quotation has defined the attitude of most Americans towards private enterprise and government since then. The second part of the quotation—the undesirability of public ownership of railroads has given way to the modern problem that no passenger railroad can be operated profitably by anyone—private or public. So Roosevelt’s “far-reaching disaster” was finally complete with the Federal Government taking over responsibility for Amtrack.
Collection of Spoken Words of the Prophet. Ironically, despite the reverence with which words of the Hadith are accorded in Islam, from time to time Muslim theologians and authorities have attempted to establish “fair prices” despite this free market view of the Prophet.
This rigid view left no room for regulation which is what almost every modern industrial democracy has chosen. To some of his extremist followers, any government regulation of business or the economy whatsoever, regardless of how little, means that the nation has embraced socialism. It is in this sense that many extreme right wingers viewed Presidents like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama as socialists while they saw themselves as opponents of socialism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
