Will Rogers Quotes
We never will have any prosperity that is free from speculation till we pass a law that every time a broker or person sells something, he has got to have it sitting there in a bucket, or a bag, or a jug, or a cage, or a rat trap, or something, depending on what it is he is selling. We are continually buying something that we never get from a man that never had it.
Rogers, Will. The Will Rogers Book, edited by Paula McSpadden Love, Bobbs-Merrill, 1961.
The result was regulation of the banks and the creation of the SEC to regulate the stock market, However, over the years, the regulations were not able to keep up with the sophisticated development of new forms of investments and financial instruments and the financial industry were able to speculate with other people’s money in ways that FDR and his reformers never imagined. Finally, even the regulation that did exist was weakened by the policies of the George W. Bush administration and the combination brought about the Great Recession of 2008 where the profits from excess speculation were privatized and the losses, socialized with the taxpayer and the American worker bearing the brunt while most of the speculators were bailed out and made more money than ever. The Obama administration tried to reform the situation, but was unable to put an end to the legal speculation with other people’s money or of having institutions that were “too big to fail.”
Vladimir Lenin. Terrorism has been an instrument of dictatorial states in general and most revolutions. Speculators as used by Lenin at this time were not just businessmen or capitalists. They were people who bought up and hoarded scarce resources and food, waiting for worse shortage, and then selling their food or other goods at very high prices. Or they would take advantage of the fact that farmers did not have enough to eat and only give them food if why would sign over their land rights. Soon honest businessmen were treated like speculators because they made people less dependent on the party and the government. Stalin, who followed Lenin was even more extreme and had speculators, businessmen and landowners executed.
William Penn Adair Rogers was an American stage and film actor, vaudeville performer, cowboy, humorist, newspaper columnist, and social commentator from Oklahoma. He was a Cherokee citizen born in the Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory.
