Robert Hass Quotes
It's clear that there has to be some play between the vitality of invention in economic life and some regulation of it, and in some ways the great ideological wars of the 20th century that cost so many lives had to do with whether to have managed economies directed by government or economies directed by the free movement of capital, which is only partially subject to government regulation.
Hass, Robert. "Robert Hass." Interview by Sarah Pollock. Mother Jones, March/April 1997.
This rigid view left no room for regulation which is what almost every modern industrial democracy has chosen. To some of his extremist followers, any government regulation of business or the economy whatsoever, regardless of how little, means that the nation has embraced socialism. It is in this sense that many extreme right wingers viewed Presidents like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama as socialists while they saw themselves as opponents of socialism.
This would seem a much easier solution to the problem of monopoly holders charging outrageous prices than trying to fix profits or lay a large tax on the profits. However, few governments ever do this. In many cases the patent holders control or heavily influence the government. There is in addition, in most Judeo-Christian societies an assumption that most people have a moral sense and will not take undue advantage of customers just because they have the power to do so. And in the most egregious cases of monopoly pricing there were many other patents where the inventors were not gouging the consumers. It is always been the minority of businesses that have taken gross advantage of patent monopolies. However at some periods, where there was an oligarchy, all the companies in an area abused their patent monopolies together. An example would be the pharmaceutical industry of the early 21st century.
Robert L. Hass is an American poet. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He won the 2007 National Book Award and shared the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for the collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005. In 2014 he was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.
