Cornel West Quotes

Markets are the best way to allocate resources.

Value is consequently the necessary theoretical starting point whence we can elucidate the peculiar phenomenon of prices resulting from capitalist competition.

Discovering various economists, economic works, reading financial periodicals and keeping up on current events in geopolitics and economics around the world opened my eyes to many facets of how the extended order works.

Free markets work better when information is available.

Tastes and behavior are important in economics. Nobody denies that. But the question is: How much of behavior is irrational, and how much of the irrational behavior really affects prices? It turns out that's very difficult to answer.

Let's take Adam Smith, the patron-saint of capitalism, what did he think? He thought the main human instinct was sympathy. In fact, take a look at the word "invisible hand." Which, of course, you learned about, or you think you've learned about. Take a look at the actual way in which he used the phrase. There is almost no relation to what is claimed.

That invisible hand of Adam Smith seems to offer an extended middle finger to an awful lot of people.

In contrast, markets - oft mythologized as "natural" are the most unnatural things going. Libertarians will tell you "market laws are laws of nature", what baloney. Markets - and the other great modernist cornucopian tools - are magnificent wealth generating machines, built ad-hoc, through trial and error, constantly fine-tuned and refined, tinkered, adjusted.

The [liberals] consider profits as objectionable. The very existence of profits is in their eyes a proof that wage rates could be raised without harm to anybody. They speak of profit without dealing with loss. Profit and loss are the instruments by means of which the consumers keep a tight rein on all business activities. A profitable enterprise tends to expand; an unprofitable one tends to shrink. The elimination of profit renders production rigid and abolishes the consumer's control.

Economics is not an attempt to generalize human desires or human behavior; but to generalize the phenomena of price.

Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' is not above sudden, disturbing, movements. Since its inception, capitalism has known slumps and recessions, bubble and froth; no one has yet dis-invented the business cycle, and probably no one will; and what Schumpeter famously called the 'gales of creative destruction' still roar mightily from time to time. To lament these things is ultimately to lament the bracing blast of freedom itself.

There is no such thing as a free market.

I'm not an expert in it, but it seems to me that you have to let the market forces go their course.

No individual anonymous participant can influence the prices and therefore you really can speculate in the market without paying attention to morality. That's one of the positive features of markets. That's why they function.

Profit margins are probably the most mean-reverting series in finance, and if profit margins do not mean-revert, then something has gone badly wrong with capitalism. If high profits do not attract competition, there is something wrong with the system and it is not functioning properly.

Is the economy something organic or is it something engineered? I think it's closer to the organic. You harm it by artificially suppressing volatility in it.

Failure is a big part of a free market's success. People fail to live up to their potential, or to carry out all their good intentions, in all kinds of economic and political systems. Capitalism makes them pay a price for their failures, while socialism, feudalism, fascism and other systems enable personal failures, especially by those at the top, to be ignored.

Contrary to the vision of the left, it was the free market which produced affordable housing - before government intervention made housing unaffordable.

I hold all idea of regulating the currency to be an absurdity; the very terms of regulating the currency and managing the currency I look upon to be an absurdity; the currency should regulate itself; it must be regulated by the trade and commerce of the world; I would neither allow the Bank of England nor any private banks to have what is called the management of the currency.

I do not share the general view that market forces are the basis of personal liberty.

As in the instances of alchemy, astrology, witchcraft, and other such popular creeds, political economy, has a plausible idea at the root of it.

Two hundred years ago the first liberal economist, Adam Smith, warned businessmen that they could absorb only a certain amount of rigidity. In the easy days after World War II... wage rises could be financed out of inflationary price increases.

I think almost every economist would agree that government gets itself in trouble when it tries to interfere with voluntary behavior.

Political Economy or Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.

It is inherent in the nature of the capitalistic economy that, in the final analysis, the employment of the factors of production is aimed only toward serving the wishes of consumers.