The spontaneous individual optimization that drives the theories with which I began is important, but it is not enough by itself. If spontaneous Coase‐style bargains, whether through laissez-faire or political bargaining and government, eliminated socially wasteful predation and obtained the institutions that are needed for a thriving market economy, then there would not be so many grossly inefficient and poverty-stricken societies.
― Mancur Olson
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Anthropologically, money should be defined as a semantic system, broadly similar to language; writing, or weights and measures. These systems differ mainly in the purposes served and the signs employed. Language and writing serve the purpose of the communication of ideas, weights and measures that of quantitative physical relationship. As to signs, language uses oral sounds; writing employs ideograms or visual characters; weights and measures, on the other hand, use physical objects as the basis of symbols.
― Karl Polanyi
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Distributional coalitions slow down a society’s capacity to adopt new technologies and to reallocate resources in response to changing conditions, and thereby reduce the rate of economic growth.
― Mancur Olson
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The history of mankind and the place of the economy in it, is not, as the evolutionists would have it, an account of unconscious growth and organic continuity. Such an approach would necessarily obscure some aspects of economic development vital to men in the present phase of transition. For the dogma of organic continuity must, in the last resort, weaken man’s power of shaping his own history.
― Karl Polanyi
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In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.
~ Alexis de Tocqueville
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Trade is the natural enemy of all violent passions. Trade loves moderation, delights in compromise, and is most careful to avoid anger. It is patient, supple, and insinuating, only resorting to extreme measures in cases of absolute necessity. Trade makes men independent of one another and gives them a high idea of their personal importance: it leads them to want to manage their own affairs and teaches them to succeed therein. Hence it makes them inclined to liberty but disinclined to revolution.
~ Alexis de Tocqueville
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Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse.
~ Alexis de Tocqueville
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The First thing that strikes a traveler in the United States is the innumerable multitude of those who seek to emerge from their original condition; and the second is the rarity of lofty ambition to be observed in the midst of the universally ambitious stir of society.
~ Alexis de Tocqueville
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