Sublime

Property is a prerequisite for long-term inequality.

Keynes was a failed investor and statistician who never studied economics but was so well‐connected with the ruling class in Britain that the embarrassing drivel he wrote in his most famous book, The General Theory of Employment, Money, and Interest, was immediately elevated into the status of founding truths of macroeconomics. His theory begins wi

In that respect, the American consumer boom represented the final flowering of the Connecticut Valley machine tradition of Thomas Blanchard, John Hall, and the great superintendents at the Springfield Armory. The woman who breaks the bobbin on her sewing machine while running up curtains at home and the soldier in the field with a broken gunlock pr

To–day the rich man knows in his heart that he is a cancer and not an organ of the State. He differs from all other thieves or parasites for this reason: that the brigand who takes by force wishes his victims to be rich. But he who wins by a one–sided contract actually wishes them to be poor.

Today’s economy is good at generating three things: wealth, the ability to show off wealth, and great envy for other people’s wealth.

All social inequality, in the long run, is inequality of income. That is part of the argument for democracy: that the attempt to have a “proportionate justice” based on any merit other than wealth is sure to break down. Defenders of oligarchy pretend that income is proportional to virtue; the prophet said he had never seen a righteous man begging h

When the limitation of consumption is combined with this release of acquisitive activity, the inevitable practical result is obvious: accumulation of capital through ascetic compulsion to save.85 The restraints which were imposed upon the consumption of wealth naturally served to increase it by making possible the productive investment of capital.

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