John Stuart Mill on conformity

That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.

~ John Stuart Mill

Steve Forbes on the role of profit (and the contrasting views of Adam Smith and Joseph Schumpeter)

Smith, Marx and Keynes all believed in various ways in what you might call an equilibrium, that the economy is a steady state and you get disruptions from time to time, whether wars, earthquakes or new inventions.  You get some turmoil and then things settle down and you have an equilibrium, which is why even John Stuart Mill became a socialist (not because of the influence of his young wife).  He couldn’t understand the role of profit. 

Even Adam Smith did not understand the role of profit.  If you have an economy where you are striving for a perfectly competition equilibrium, there is no role for profit, other than as a bribe for entrepreneurs to do things.  Schumpeter was an infidel, in the words of Peter Drucker.  That is, he saw profit as a cost of doing business, as a moral force.  Why?  Because in his mind the economy is always dynamic.  A free market is dynamic, always changing, what he called creative destruction.  You focus on the creative side.  But it’s also destroying, which means it’s destroying capital and you have to replace that destroyed capital with new capital. 

Also, how does an economy advance?  It advances with new knowledge.  Where does knowledge come from?  Through constant experimentation by entrepreneurs in the marketplace.  Look at Silicon Valley.  Look at Peter Thiel.  He says eight out of ten ventures, even with great brains like his, will fail.  Only two out of ten, maybe one out of ten, will really be successful. 

So, profit is essential if you’re going to have a growing economy.

~ Steve Forbes, "Full Remarks by Steve Forbes On the Presentation of a Triple Crown in Economics to Mark Skousen," July 19, 2018

John Stuart Mill on paternalistic government

The worth of the State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interest of their mental expansion and elevation to a little more of administrative skill, or of that semblance of it which practice gives in the details of business; a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes - will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.

~ John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, p. 187

John Stuart Mill on public schooling

A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government - whether this be a monarch, priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation - in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body.

~ John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, p. 177

John Stuart Mill on the suppression of truth

... The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes.  History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution.  If not suppressed forever, it may be thrown back for centuries.

~ John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

John Stuart Mill on knowing both sides of an argument

He who knows only his side of the case, knows little of that.

~ John Stuart Mill



(Cited by Sheldon Richman.)

John Stuart Mill on the hidden tax of inflation

All holders of currency lose, by the depreciation of its value, its exact equivalent of what the issuer gains.  A tax is virtually levied on them for his benefit.

~ John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill on public education, conformity and statism

A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation, in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body.

~ John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)