Trade Quotes - page 60
If one strand in the heritage of the Sixties was high-cultural pretension, the other, its intimate inversion, was a hardening crust of knowing cynicism. The relative innocence of rock and roll was increasingly displaced by media-wise pop bands whose stock in trade was a derisive appropriation and degradation of the style forged by their immediate precursors. Much as popular romances and tabloid journalism had once fastened on to mass literacy for commercial advantage, so ‘punk' rock appeared in the Seventies in order to exploit the market for popular music. Presented as ‘counter-cultural' it was in fact parasitic upon mainstream culture, invoking violent images and radical language for frequently mercenary ends.
Tony Judt
Banking is not the creator of our prosperity, but is the creation of it. It is not the cause of our wealth, but is the consequence of our wealth; and if the industrial energy and development which has been going on for so many years in this country were to be hindered or relaxed, then finance, and all that finance means, will follow trade to the countries which are more successful than ourselves.
Joseph Chamberlain
If employment is falling off, what is the lesson? The lesson is that our home trade, our domestic consumption, must have decreased in a larger proportion than our foreign trade has increased. (Hear, hear.) The competition from abroad has grown more and more severe, and, on the whole, taking our trade as a whole, it must have declined if the employment in trade has decreased. (Hear, hear.) Wages have been reduced. You have only to read the papers to see almost daily some trade or another has to submit to a reduction. That, then, is not a proof of boundless prosperity. It is a proof of comparative decline, and, in my judgment, the handwriting is on the wall, there to be read by every impartial man; and, though I contemplate no immediate catastrophe, I say the situation calls for preparation while there is still time to find a remedy. (Cheers.)
Joseph Chamberlain
4) Giving up freedom for security has begun to look naive.
Even to me. Many of you were ahead of me on this - Three out of four hijacked airplanes destroyed the World Trade Center and a piece of the Pentagon in 2001. How is it possible that those planes were taken using only five perps armed with knives? It was possible because all those hundreds of passengers had been carefully stripped of every possible weapon. We may want to reconsider this approach. It doesn't work in high schools either.
Larry Niven
Actually, the labor market was allowed to retain its main function only on condition that wages and conditions of work, standards and regulations should be such as would safeguard the human character of the alleged commodity, labor. To argue that social legislation, factory laws, unemployment insurance, and, above all, trade unions have not interfered with the mobility of labor and the flexibility of wages, as is sometimes done, is to imply that those institutions have entirely failed in their purpose, which was exactly that of interfering with the laws of supply and demand in respect to human labor, and removing it from the orbit of the market.
Karl Polanyi
So why did you do it?”
August stared at the ceiling pensively. "It gets easier to risk your life as you get older. I think women understand that when they have children. Suddenly they know they would give their life for their child, and it doesn't bother them. With men it's different, but we...trade our allegiance in the same way. At some point, if you've grown up at all, you have to decide that something outside yourself is more important than you are. Otherwise you'll be a miserable bastard, and you'll die screaming.” He closed one eye and peered at Jordan. "That make sense?”
"I don't know,” Jordan said uncomfortably.
"You get perspective. You can stand outside your own death, a little. Not while you're dying, though.
Karl Schroeder
The result of what has been said is, in general, that the wealth and power of all nations depending so much on their trade and commerce, and every nation being...in such different circumstances of advantage or disadvantage in the pursuit of this common interest; a good government, and therefore the government of a patriot king, will be directed constantly to make the most of every advantage that nature has given, or art can procure towards the improvement of trade and commerce. And this is one of the principal criterions, by which we are to judge whether governors are in the true interest of the people, or not.
It results, in particular, that Great Britain might improve her wealth and power in a proportion superior to that of any nation who can be deemed her rival, if the advantages she has were as wisely cultivated, as they will be in the reign of a patriot king.
Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
Anyone who believes that the rise in the standard of living of the working classes in this country in the last twenty years or the last hundred and twenty years is due to the existence and actions of the trade unions, will believe anything. It is the kind of absurdity which people only entertain when they are desperately determined to do so, for fear of the consequences of disbelief. The rise in that standard is due to the greater productivity of labour, proceeding in turn from a whole host of causes-greater scientific and technical knowledge, more capital, better organisation, and so on. We all know this, and we all know that it has nothing whatever to do with restraint of trade or restriction of competition.
Enoch Powell
Contrary to popular belief there is no reason whatever to suppose that the remuneration of labour in general has been raised by the combination of labour through the trade unions to a higher level than it would have stood at otherwise. The rising standard of living of the employed population is due to many causes; but restrictive practices are not among them. No doubt in individual occupations combination has from time to time succeeded in raising real wages above what they would have been in its absence; but any such gain, which is invariably at the expense of workers in other employments and of the general public, is always temporary and usually brief. After more or less inconvenience and, in recent times, by dint of more or less inflation, the pattern of real wages reverts to one which corresponds with the balance of supply and demand for labour in the various employments in different parts of the country.
Enoch Powell
The Government know perfectly well that, in order to cope with the rising inflation and disastrous trade balance, it is indispensable to budget for a severe increase in taxation and a further reduction in the rate of growth of public expenditure. They have the majority and the authority to do this now. They do not need an election in order to act in the national interest. Nor do they need an election to get the country back to full-time work. Neither the miners nor the other trade unions have broken the law or threatened to break it. There is nothing sacrosanct about stage 3 or the Government's interpretations of it. A settlement will have to be found in the mining industry – and in every other industry – which will get the necessary labour into the necessary jobs.
Enoch Powell
Enoch was right. He had made the two intellectual leaps in economic policy which Keith Joseph and I would only make some years later. First, he had grasped that it was not the unions which caused inflation by pushing up wages, but rather the Government which did so by increasing the supply of money in the economy. Consequently, incomes policies...were a supreme irrelevance to anti-inflation policy. The only aspect of the matter which Enoch then and later failed sufficiently to grasp was the importance of the indirect link between trade union power and inflation. This lay in the fact that over-powerful trade unions priced their own members out of jobs, and inflicted unemployment on both union and non-union workers alike. Governments...would then react by lowering interest rates and expanding the money supply. This would increase demand and jobs for a time, but it also increased inflation... That said, Enoch's insight into the cause of inflation was of supreme importance.
Enoch Powell
Beggars do not work, it is said; but then, what is work? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, bronchitis etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course - but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout-in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering.
George Orwell
There will be shifts of sovereignty but only in specific areas which I consider debatable. The [European] Community should lead as external trade negotiator. ... But there must be basic areas of national sovereignty. Peace and war; law and order; foreign policy; fiscal policy. You can cooperate, but these are not matters for Community competence. Our resistance was entirely justified in the case of the Social Charter. ... I do not believe in the European glacier, that there is something irresistible about European integration.
Douglas Hurd
In 1979, with changing technology, I wrote and produced a video on the life and times of Eugene Victor Debs that was sold to colleges around the country. Debs was a great American who played an enormously important role in our history, but he was unknown to most people. He was one of the leading trade union leaders of the late nineteenth century, the founder of the American Socialist Party, and a six-time candidate for president of the United States. In 1920, he received nearly 1 million votes for president while he was in jail for his opposition to World War I. Many of the ideas that Debs campaigned on were later adopted by FDR and incorporated into the New Deal. Today, I have a plaque of Debs on a wall in my Senate office.
Eugene V. Debs
The case for European solidarity has never been stronger than it is today because the pressures piling up on Europe are themselves strong and varied. At the moment the headlines in our newspapers concentrate on certain trading arguments with the United States. Clearly we in Europe deal better with these problems when we work together, and where pressures become unacceptable we can best secure their relaxation by reacting together. Of course we should remind ourselves that our aim is not to confront the United States with our own economic strength, great though that is if we work together. Our aim must be to work out a common view with the United States, based in the case of the pipeline on a common analysis of the role of trade in East–West relations.
Douglas Hurd
I don't care what the science fiction trade technicians say, either. They are furious that I get away with murder. I use a scientific idea as a platform to leap into the air and never come back. This keeps them angry at me. They still begrudge my putting an atmosphere on Mars in The Martian Chronicles more than 40 years ago.
Ray Bradbury
P. V. Narasimha Rao always tried to take the opposition into confidence. To cite a few examples, he had deputed Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee as the leader of the Indian delegation to the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva to discuss Pakistan-sponsored resolution to censure India on its record of human rights in Jammu & Kashmir, which was successfully thwarted. He had also nominated Shri Subramanian Swamy as Chairman of the Commission on Labour Standards and International Trade, with a Cabinet-rank.
Manmohan Singh
The resources necessary to man are as sacred as life itself. Everything that is indispensable for its preservation is a property common to all of society. Only the surplus is private property and is abandoned to the industry of merchants. Any mercantile speculation that I make at the cost of the life of my countrymen is not trade, but brigandage and fratricide.
Maximilien Robespierre
