By prohibitions and protective duties it does not give directions to individuals how to employ their productive powers and capital

(as the popular school sophistically alleges); it does not tell the one, ‘You must invest your money in the building of a ship, or in the erection of a manufactory;’ or the other, ‘You must be a naval captain or a civil engineer;’ it leaves it to the judgment of every individual how and where to invest his capital, or to what vocation he will devote himself. It merely says, ‘It is to the advantage of our nation that we manufacture these or the other goods ourselves; but as by free competition with foreign countries we can never obtain possession o this advantage, we have imposed restrictions on that competition, so far as in our opinion is necessary, to give those among us who invest their capital in these new branches of industry, and those who devote their bodily and mental powers to them, the requisite guarantees that they shall not lose their capital and shall not miss their vocation in life; and further to stimulate foreigners to come over to our side with their productive powers. In this manner, it does not in the least degree restrain private industry; on the contrary, it secures to the personal, natural, and moneyed powers of the nation a greater and wider field of activity. It does not thereby do something which its individual citizens could understand better and do better than it; on the contrary, it does something which the individuals, even if they understood it, would not be able to do for themselves.

 

 

Freidrich List in “The National System of Political Economy”; page 167 – 168

(1) Whereas economic man supposedly maximizes—selects the best alternative from among all those available to him—his cousin, the administrator, satisfices

—looks for a course of action that is satisfactory or “good enough.” Examples of satisficing criteria, familiar enough to business people, if unfamiliar to most economists, are “share of market,” “reasonable profit,” “fair price.”
(2) Economic man purports to deal with the “real world” in all its complexity. The administrator recognizes that the perceived world is a drastically simplified model of the buzzing, blooming confusion that constitutes the real world. The administrator treats situations as only loosely connected with each other—most of the facts of the real world have no great relevance to any single situation and the most significant chains of causes and consequences are short and simple. One can leave out of account those aspects of reality—and that means most aspects—that appear irrelevant at a given time. Administrators (and everyone else, for that matter) take into account just a few of the factors of the situation regarded as most relevant and crucial. In particular, they deal with one or a few problems at a time, because the limits on attention simply don’t permit everything to be attended to at once.

 

 

Herbert A. Simon in “Administrative Behavior”; page 119

disenfranchisement is not only political degradation, but also moral, social, educational and industrial degradation

Wherever, on the face of the globe or on the page of history, you show me a disfranchised class, I will show you a degraded class of labor. … You remember the old adage, “Beggars must not be choosers;” they must take what they can get or nothing! That is exactly the position of women in the world of work today; they can not choose. If they could, do you for a moment believe they would take the subordinate places and the inferior pay? Nor it is a “new thing under the sun” for the disfranchised, the inferior classes weighed down with wrongs, to declare they “do not want to vote.” The rank and file are not philosophers, they are not educated to think for themselves, but simply to accept, unquestioned, whatever comes. Years ago in England when the workingmen, starving in the mines and factories, gathered in mobs and took bread wherever they could get it, their friends tried to educate them into a knowledge of the causes of their poverty and degradation. At one of these “monster bread meetings,” held in Manchester, John Bright said to them, “Workingmen, what you need to bring to you cheap bread and plenty of it, is the franchise;” but those ignorant men shouted back to Mr. Bright, precisely as the women of America do to us today, “It is not the vote we want, it is bread;” and they broke up the meeting, refusing to allow him, their best friend, to explain to them the powers of the franchise.

Susan B. Anthony, quoted in Lynn Sherr’s “Failure is Impossible”; page 137 – 138

no society can properly function without classification,

without an arrangement of things and men in classes and prescribed types. This necessary classification is the basis for all social discrimination, and discrimination, present opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, is no less a constituent element of the social realm than equality is a constituent element of the political.

Hannah Arendt, in introduction to Walter Benjamin’s “Illuminations”; page 3

In fact U.S. administrations have been waging trade war against Japan and the EC

ever since the 1971 fall from grace; this was the first line of defense of their imperial prerogatives. The list of American “initiatives” in trade is a long one. It runs from President Nixon’s 1971 import surtax to the “orderly marketing agreements” reached with South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan “voluntarily” to limit their exports of cotton and synthetic textiles (1973), with Japan to slow its automobile exports (1981), and with the EC to curb steel shipments (1982). In 1982 the Reagan administration ruptured the Atlantic alliance with an embargo on exports of turbines and other equipment by U.S.-affiliated firms in Britain, France, West Germany, and Italy to the Soviet Union for its Siberian gas pipeline to Europe, an exercise in extraterritoriality that drew an angry rejection even from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. In 1983 Washington put on new sugar quotas, subsidized a large sale of wheat flour, butter, and cheese to Egypt, a French customer, to punish the EC for its tariff protection of its own farmers; increased the U.S. tariff on motorcycles tenfold; doubled duties on specialty steel and stainless steel plate; and placed restrictions on 40 categories of garments from several Asian countries including China. In 1986 the Reagan administration set new ceilings on imports of European whiskey, wine, pork, hams, chocolates, and olives to retaliate for food sales the United States allegedly lost to Spain and Portugal when they joined the EC; it also imposed a five-year tariff on Canadian cedar shingles and shakes, drawing immediate retaliation from Ottawa against American books, periodicals, and computer parts and a reminder that Canada remains the largest U.S. trading partner. In 1987 the Reagan administration slapped 100 percent tariffs on certain Japanese computers, television sets, and power tools. In the late 1980s it was taking aim at a high-tech rival, Airbus Industrie, a European consortium whose passenger jets were challenging Boeing and McDonnel Douglas in the hotly competitive international aircraft market.

Richard DuBoff in “Accumulation & Power”; pages 165 – 166