FQ.06.49: Favorite Quote for This Week

For millennia—until quite recently—human beings struggled to rise above subsistence because of a stubborn inability to recognize how wealth is created. Certainly into the late 18th century, people mistakenly believed that there was simply a fixed amount of wealth in the world, and that it was left to individuals and governments to fight over their share. Not until Adam Smith was it recognized that wealth can grow without limits, but obviously even now people have a hard time wrapping their minds around this idea.
—Robert W. Godwin

Comments

[a Duoist]

Ms. Arbour, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, today linked world poverty to rich nations' uncaring, to their agricultural subsidies and to their large military expenditures.

Obviously, she never read Adam Smith's expert advice on how to create national prosperity.

'Be free.'

[R]

sadly, thanks to Karl Marx and his promoters, we have a long way to go before many people understand what Smith wrote ~250 years ago in Wealth of Nations.

[mike]

It never ceases to amaze me how the 18th century mindset still has a grip. I heard Rajiv Gandhi (a grandson) on NPR the other day in a speech where he actually blamed the global terror problem on capitalism. The rich are taking from the poor, so the poor are fighting back. ack! I almost drove off the road.