#economics

Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, and responsibility for the arrangement of our own life according to our own conscience, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily recreated in the free decision of the individual. Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one's own conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to bear the consequences of one's own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name. ↗

— Friedrich A. von Hayek

#freedom

The mistake you make, don't you see,is in thinking one can live in a corrupt society without being corrupt oneself. After all, what do you achieve by refusing to make money? You're trying to behave as though one could stand right outside our economic system. But one can't. One's got to change the system, or one changes nothing. One can't put things right in a hole-and-corner way, if you take my meaning. ↗

— George Orwell

#economics-society #money #society #system #change

Everything has its own equilibrium point. ↗

— Nithisup

#love #philosophy-of-life #rich #life

All love is socioeconomic. It’s the gradients in status that make arousal possible. ↗

— Gary Shteyngart

#gary-shteyngart #humor #love #russian-debutante-s-handbook #socioeconomics

How beautiful can life be? We hardly dare imagine it. ↗

— Charles Eisenstein

#life #paradise #sacred-economics #social-change #social-vision

This is perhaps as good a place as any to point out that what distinguishes many reformers from those who cannot accept their proposals is not their greater philanthropy, but their greater impatience. The question is not whether we wish to see everybody as well off as possible. Among men of good will such an aim can be taken for granted. The real question concerns the proper means of achieving it. And in trying to answer this we must never lose sight of a few elementary truisms. We cannot distribute more wealth than is created. We cannot in the long run pay labor as a whole more than it produces. ↗

— Henry Hazlitt

#men

The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that. ↗

— John Burdett

#capitalism #economics #politics #western-civilization #inspirational

There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: "In the long run we are all dead." And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the ripest wisdom. ↗

— Henry Hazlitt

#fdr #keynes #obama #progressivism #men

The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads. ↗

— John Steinbeck

#politics #men

Seen from that future time, when every commodity the human mind could imagine would flow from the industrial horn of plenty in dizzy abundance, this would seem a scanty, shoddy, cramped moment indeed, choked with shadows, redeemed only by what it caused to be created. Seen from plenty, now would be hard to imagine. It would seem not quite real, an absurd time when, for no apparent reason, human beings went without things easily within the power of humanity to supply and lives did not flower as it was obvious they could. ↗

— Francis Spufford

#economics #marxism #planned-economy #socialism #imagination