The Progressive Era Quotes

“One of the major reasons for the failure of Fink and the trunk cartels was the truly heroic activities of one of the most maligned railroad financiers of this era: Jay Gould.”
― Murray Rothbard, The Progressive Era

“Originally, the prohibitionists had habitually referred to themselves as temperate, as men of temperance. By the 1880s and 1890s, however, this was no longer true: the prohibitionists now spoke of themselves as “radicals.” It was no longer enough to attack hard liquor; denunciations of beer were now stepped up.”
― Murray N. Rothbard, The Progressive Era

“The ICC was therefore in keeping with the law when, to the delight of the railroads, it decided to give its sanction and imprimatur to the freight rates worked out by the railroad rate associations—in short, to use the federal government to ratify rates decided upon by private railroad cartels.”
― Murray N. Rothbard, The Progressive Era

“The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, regulating the railroads, was one of the first federal regulatory acts in American history. The Act began with a bill introduced in the House by Democratic Representative James H. Hopkins of Pittsburgh, in 1876 at the behest of a group of independent oil producers of western Pennsylvania.”
― Murray N. Rothbard, The Progressive Era

“The main drawback of the government sponsored transcontinentals was that they were not funded through market savings but instead government loans and land grants, and were thus not disciplined by profit and loss. By granting subsidies, the government diverted resources away from where consumers would have spent their money (and hence valued more highly).”
― Murray N. Rothbard, The Progressive Era

“The key, then, for both rural and urban areas, was ethnic-religious factors, which in contrast to the economic, have not been considered “real” by most historians.[14]”
― Murray Rothbard, The Progressive Era