Among the most viable of all economic delusions is the belief that machines on net balance create unemployment. Destroyed a thousand times, it has risen a thousand times out of its own ashes as hardy and vigorous as ever. Whenever there is long-continued mass unemployment, machines get the blame anew. This fallacy is still the basis of many labor union practices. The public tolerates these practices because it either believes at bottom that the unions are right, or is too confused to see just why they are wrong. The belief that machines cause unemployment, when held with any logical consistency, leads to preposterous conclusions. Not only must we be causing unemployment with every technological improvement we make today, but primitive man must have started causing it with the first efforts he made to save himself from needless toil and sweat.
Henry HazlittRelated topics
ash balance basis belief blame bottom cause causing consistency fallacy hardy hold improvement labor man mass net primitive public right rise save see sweat thousand times toil union viable wrong today unemploymentRelated quotes
Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed - chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble primeval forests. ... It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods - trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries ... God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools - only Uncle Sam can do that.
John Muir
[On the attendees at the launch of Apollo 11] Those people were not a stampeding herd, nor a manipulated mob; they did not wreck the Florida communities, they did not devastate the countryside, they did not throw themselves, like whining thugs, at the mercy of their victims - they did not create any victims. They came as responsible individuals able to project the reality of two or three days ahead, and to provide for their own needs. There were people of every age, creed, color, educational level and economic status. They lived and slept in tents, or in their cars, some for several days, in great discomfort and unbearable heat; they did it gamely, cheerfully, gaily; they projected a general feeling of confident goodwill, the bond of a common enthusiasm; they created a public spectacle of responsible privacy - and they departed as they had come, without benefit of press agents.
Ayn Rand
It is said the South will never submit - that we cannot conquer the rebels - that they will suffer themselves to be slaughtered, and their whole country to be laid waste. Sir, war is a grievous thing at best, and civil war more than any other; but if they hold this language, and the means which they have suggested must be resorted to; if their whole country must be laid waste and made a desert, in order to save this Union from destruction, so let it be. I would rather, Sir, reduce them to a condition where their whole country is to be re-peopled by a band of freemen, than to see them perpetrate the destruction of this people through our agency. I do not say it is time to resort to such means, and I do not say that the time will come, but I never fear to express my sentiments. It is not a question with me of policy, but a question of principle.
Thaddeus Stevens
So David outside of gay and lesbian issues, first of all no one should get fired because they are gay or lesbian period. But when you set these laws up my experience with these laws are you create a protected class. And I speak as someone who started a one man handyman business in Albuquerque in 1974 and grew it to over a thousand employees... I'll tell you because of our laws that we passed on safety issues that this whole notion of whistle blower legislation it sounds great but the reality is... employees that were horrible declared themselves to be whistle blowers in the safety category or they declared themselves an alcoholic because of legislation [feedback] the American for Disabilities Act... I want that person who breaks a window breaks a windshield with a rock prosecuted on the basis that they threw a rock through a windshield not because they were motivated by hate.
Gary Johnson
In fact, there is something puzzling about the Higgs mass we now do observe. It is generally known as the "hierarchy problem.” Since it is the Higgs mass that sets the scale for the masses of all other known elementary particles, one might guess that it should be similar to another mass that plays a fundamental role in physics, the so-called Planck mass, which is the fundamental unit of mass in the theory of gravitation. (It is the mass of hypothetical particles whose gravitational attraction for one another would be as strong as the electric force between two electrons separated by the same distance.) But the Planck mass is about a hundred thousand trillion times larger than the Higgs mass. So, although the Higgs particle is so heavy that a giant particle collider was needed to create it, we still have to ask, why is the Higgs mass so small?
Steven Weinberg
