Wayne Winegarden and Rowena Itchon on creative destruction

International trade, like all productive contributions to economic growth, is a creatively destructive process that improves our lives by disrupting the old way of doing things.  While necessary to generate broad-based prosperity, these disruptions are not without a cost.  The growth in internet retailers, for instance, has brought a wider array of more affordable goods and services directly to people’s doorsteps around the world.  Between 2007 and 2017, it also created nearly a half million new jobs in fulfillment centers and e-commerce companies in the U.S. alone that paid nearly a third more than brick-and-mortar retail jobs on average.  While the job gains in the new economy also caused job losses and business closings for brick-and-mortar retailers, on net, e-commerce has vastly improved our quality of life.

~ Wayne Winegarden and Rowena Itchon, “Free Trade Myths and Realities” Free Trade in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 643-644

Kevin Duffy on Walter Williams

As a younger man, I had the privilege of hearing the late free market economist, Walter Williams, speak.  “People are worried about saving jobs, but as an economist, I get excited when jobs are destroyed,” he told the audience.  “Should we bemoan the invention of the dishwashing machine because it puts dish washers out of work?  There are an infinite number of jobs. Just come to my house this weekend and I’ll prove it to you.”

~ Kevin Duffy, "Mercantilism in America," The Coffee Can Portfolio, May 6, 2025

Cathie Wood: "We've never seen this amount of change at the same time in history"

What's fascinating about this period is that now we're seeing a flood of IPOs, a flood of secondaries, we've seen SPACs, which really are liquidity events earlier than otherwise might have taken place, because I think there's a collective understanding that the future is here.  And if we don't invest now, we're going to lose out...  So we've got five platforms, 14 different technologies.  We've never seen this amount of change at the same time in history.

~ Cathie Wood, "A typical day for Ark Invest's star stock picker Cathie Wood," Yahoo!Finance, 3:10 mark, February 6, 2021