John Kenneth Galbraith (1908 – 2006)
Canadian-American economist and author.
In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.
There is wonder and a certain wicked pleasure in these giddy ascents and terrible falls, especially as they happen to other people.
The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations... But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness.
Truth has anciently been called the first casualty of war. Money may, in fact, have priority.
We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.
A businessman who reads Business Week is lost to fame. One who reads Proust is marked for greatness.
No grant of feudal privilege has ever equaled, for effortless return, that of the grandparent who bought and endowed his descendants with a thousand shares of General Motors or General Electric.
This is what economics now does. It tells the young and susceptible (and also the old and vulnerable) that economic life has no content of power and politics because the firm is safely subordinate to the market and the state and for this reason it is safely at the command of the consumer and citizen. Such an economics is not neutral. It is the influential and invaluable ally of those whose exercise of power depends on an acquiescent public. If the state is the executive committee of the great corporation and the planning system, it is partly because neoclassical economics is its instrument for neutralizing the suspicion that this is so.
THE GENIUS of the industrial system lies in its organized use of capital and technology. This is made possible, as we have duly seen, by extensively replacing the market with planning.
Oligopoly is an imperfect monopoly. Like the despotism of the Dual Monarchy, it is saved only by its incompetence.
If all else fails immortality can always be assured by adequate error.
American university presidents are a nervous breed; I have never thought well of them as a class.
But now, as throughout history, financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with communism, lies the threat to capitalism. It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound.
But it can be laid down as a rule that those who speak most of liberty are least inclined to use it.
In dealing with Mr. Nixon, it is not easy to be unfair. He invites and justifies all available criticism.
If inheritance qualifies one for office, intelligence cannot be a requirement.
The privileged have regularly invited their own destruction with their greed.
Ideas may be superior to vested interest. They are also very often the children of vested interest.
One man's consumption becomes his neighbor's wish.
Going back to the most ancient times, national well-being, the national prestige depended on territory. The more territory a country had, the more income revenue there was, the more people there were to be mobilized for arms strength. So we had an enormous sense of territorial conflict and territorial integrity, and that was unquestionably a part of the cause of war, coupled with the fact that there was a disposition in that direction by the landed class, a disposition to think of territorial acquisition and territorial defense and to think of the peasantry as a superior form of livestock which could be used for arms purposes.