Capitalism in America Quotes

“The United States is also losing the rugged pioneering spirit that once defined it. In 1850, Herman Melville boasted that “we are the pioneers of the world, the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World.”7 Today many of the descendants of these pioneers are too terrified of tripping up to set foot on any new path. The problem starts with school. In 2013, a school district in Maryland banned, among other things, pushing children on swings, bringing homemade food into school, and distributing birthday invitations on school grounds.8 It continues in college, where professors have provided their charges with “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.” It extends to every aspect of daily life. McDonald’s prints warning signs on its cups of coffee pointing out that “this liquid may be hot.” Winston Churchill once said to his fellow countrymen, “We have not journeyed across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.”9 Today, thanks to a malign combination of litigation, regulation, and pedagogical fashion, sugar-candy people are everywhere.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“John Jacob Astor succeeded in amassing America’s biggest fortune by trading in the furs of beavers, otters, muskrats, and bears (though he wisely used some of the money he made from hunting in America’s great wilderness to buy real estate in Manhattan).”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that bar code scanners at checkout counters increased the speed that cashiers could ring up payments by 30 percent and reduced labor requirements of cashiers and baggers by 10 to 15 percent.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“Four decades after Thomas Edison’s spectacular illumination of Lower Manhattan in 1882, electricity had done little to make the country’s factories more productive.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“A study of a cohort of 4,800 African Americans born between 1952 and 1982 shows that, as they grew into adults, 69 percent of the cohort remain in the same county, 82 percent remain in the same state, and 90 percent remain in the same region. The figures for the previous generation were 50 percent, 65 percent, and 74 percent.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“The big three television companies (CBS, ABC, and NBC) measured their audiences in tens of millions: when CBS broadcast the episode of I Love Lucy in which Lucy had a baby to coincide with the actress who played Lucy, Lucille Ball, also having a baby, on January 19, 1953, 68.8 percent of the country’s television sets were tuned in, a far higher proportion than were tuned in to Dwight Eisenhower’s inauguration the following day.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“More than 90 percent of Americans lived in the countryside, either on farms or plantations. Only three cities, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, had populations of more than 16,000, making them flyspecks compared with London (750,000) or Peking (almost 3 million).6”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“The population of the Pacific states increased by 110 percent from 1940 to 1960.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“Eisenhower’s biggest domestic achievement was arguably the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which called for 41,000 miles of highways to be built by 1969 at an estimated cost of $ 25 billion. Predictably enough, the targets were missed: the first transcontinental interstate, I-80, was not finished until 1986 and the southern interstate, I-10, was not completed until 1990.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“America’s share of the world’s patents has increased from 10 percent when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 to 20 percent today.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“In the nineteenth century, the population multiplied by a factor of almost fifteen, from 5.3 million to 76 million, a total larger than any European country except Russia. By 1890, 80 percent of New York’s citizens were immigrants or the children of immigrants, as were 87 percent of Chicago’s.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“These immigrants were an undoubted plus for the economy.5 They were disproportionately young adults with few dependents and a drive to make it. They were all by definition adventurers who were willing to risk an ocean voyage to a new world for a chance of a better life. They provided the hands and muscles that built the machines, roads, and bridges of a rapidly industrializing nation:”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“For the most part, innovation (multifactor productivity) and unit-cost reduction (output per hour) depend on a complex interaction of new ideas and production processes that can take decades to bear fruit.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“New England was a land of textile mills powered by water, the South a land of plantations powered by slaves. This division became more pronounced over time as the North invested in new machinery and the South invested in more slavery.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“In 1900, work generally meant sometimes dangerous and usually backbreaking physical labor. Farmers had to wrestle with the elements from droughts that could make the land too hard to work, floods that could drench them, and insects that constantly bit at them. Manual laborers had to wrestle with heavy machines that could kill or maim them if not properly handled. By 2000, it largely meant sitting in the office. The number of Americans who died as a result of accidents at work fell from 38 per 100,000 workers in 1900 to 4 per 100,000 in 2000.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“It rejected the temptation to punish its opponents as the Europeans had done at Versailles, recognizing the wisdom of Herbert Hoover’s advice to Harry Truman in 1946 that “you can have vengeance, or peace, but you can’t have both.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“By one estimate, U.S. output per worker hour was double Germany’s and five times Japan’s.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“(thirty-one of the first forty U.S. Post Office pilots were killed in the first six years).”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“Slave owners invested a growing amount of capital in their slaves: by 1861, almost half the total value of the South’s capital assets was in the “value of negroes.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“Winston Churchill once said to his fellow countrymen, “We have not journeyed across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.” Today, thanks to a malign combination of litigation, regulation, and pedagogical fashion, sugar-candy people are everywhere.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“America has been much better than almost every other country at resisting the temptation to interfere with the logic of creative destruction. In most of the world, politicians have made a successful business out of promising the benefits of creative destruction without the costs. Communists have blamed the costs on capitalist greed. Populists have blamed them on sinister vested interests. European-style socialists have taken a more mature approach, admitting that creation and destruction are bound together, but claiming to be able to boost the creative side of creative destruction while eliminating the destructive side through a combination of demand management and wise intervention. The result has usually been disappointing: stagnation, inflation, or some other crisis.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“America’s rise to greatness has been marred by numerous disgraces, prime among them the mistreatment of the aboriginal peoples and the enslavement of millions of African Americans. Yet judged against the broad sweep of history, it has been a huge positive. America has not only provided its own citizens with a prosperous life. It has exported prosperity in the form of innovations and ideas. Without America’s intervention in the Second World War, Adolf Hitler might well have subdued Europe. Without America’s unwavering commitment to the Cold War, Joseph Stalin’s progeny might still be in power in Eastern Europe and perhaps much of Asia. Uncle Sam provided the arsenal of democracy that saved the twentieth century from ruin.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States

“America’s genius lay in three things that are rather more subtle than invention: making innovations more user friendly; producing companies that can commercialize these innovations; and developing techniques for running these companies successfully.”
― Alan Greenspan, Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States