William Graham Sumner Quotes
Moreover, there is an unearned increment on capital and on labor, due to the presence, around the capitalist and the laborer, of a great, industrious, and prosperous society.
Sumner, William Graham. What Social Classes Owe to Each Other. Harper & Brothers, 1883, p. 48.
Rich people the world over have often sought a safe way to save their money. Unfortunately, in most counties of the world, there is not the rule of law and the limited government that is in the United States and a few other industrial democracies. So the rich of those countries will often avoid investing their money in their own country and instead invest it in the United States or another “safe” country. This lack of patriotism makes development of poorer countries that much more difficult. However, the rulers of those countries rarely do the things necessary to create a reasonably safe environment for investment. Even in America, some wealthy people will invest in other nations or “bet against the dollar” in favor of the Yen, the Swiss Franc or the Euro. During the American Revolution and the War of 1812, there was every reason for wealthy Americans to send their money to England for investment or banking there, However, most American wealthy families were patriotic enough not to maximize their personal income.
This was an honest theoretical belief of Mises. However, most of the criticism of capitalism in the industrial democracies is precisely the lack of unemployment and sustenance for all. When it does, even complaints about inequality tend to be minimal. But some capitalist societies never provided these, and by the 21st century, no capitalist nation was able to do so permanently without recessions and depressions.
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William Graham Sumner was a classical liberal American social scientist. He taught social sciences at Yale, where he held the nation's first professorship in sociology. He was one of the most influential teachers at Yale or any other major school. Sumner wrote widely within the social sciences, with numerous books and essays on American history, economic history, political theory, sociology, and anthropology. He supported laissez-faire economics, free markets, and the gold standard. He adopted the term "ethnocentrism" to identify the roots of imperialism, which he strongly opposed, and as a spokesman against it he was in favor of the "forgotten man" of the middle class, a term he coined. He had a long-term influence on conservatism in the United States.
