money has no essence. It’s not “really” anything; therefore, its nature has always been and presumably always will be a matter of political contention.
But if Smith was right, and gold and silver became money through the natural workings of the market completely independently of governments, then wouldn’t the obvious thing be to just grab control of the gold and silver mines?
Even logic and conversation are really just forms of trading, and as in all things, humans will always try to seek their own best advantage, to seek the greatest profit they can from the exchange.
While opposing injustice nonviolently, he (Gandhi) insisted, is always morally superior to opposing it violently, opposing injustice violently is still morally superior to doing nothing to oppose it at all.
There seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.
The real origin of the democratic spirit – and most likely, many democratic institutions – lies precisely in those spaces of improvisation just outside the control of governments and organized churches.
[A] great embarrassing fact… haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft.
I am well known by my friends to be a workaholic – to their often justifiable annoyance. I am therefore keenly aware that such behavior is at best slightly pathological, and certainly in no sense makes one a better person.
Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indign
IMF is really designed to protect creditors not debtors.
Honor is Surplus Dignity: Honor, at its simplest, is that excess dignity that must be defended with the knife or sword. Wherever honor is at issue, it comes with a sense that dignity can be lost, and therefore must be constantly defended.