Word: adamancy
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...profit motive which, like it or not, is a powerful human drive. To many idealists the primacy of the profit motive has long seemed to be a sanctification of selfishness that produces a brutalizing, beggar-thy-neighbor society. Victorian Moralist John Ruskin denounced "the deliberate blasphemy of Adam Smith: Thou shalt hate the Lord thy God, damn His laws, and covet thy neighbour's goods...
...there is no alternative to capitalism that credibly promises both wealth and liberty. Despite its transitory woes and weaknesses, capitalism in the foreseeable future will not only survive but also stands to prosper and spread. Perhaps the most balanced judgment of Adam Smith's wondrous system is Winston Churchill's famous conclusion about democracy: It is the worst system?except for all those other systems that have been tried and failed...
...Toynbee has glumly predicted that the commodity-producing nations will launch a kind of economic siege warfare against the Western capitalistic world, which will react by putting its own economies "in irons"?that is, dictatorially regulating all production, consumption and investment. U.S. Economist Milton Friedman, a disciple of Adam Smith, darkly suspects that capitalist freedom will turn out to be "an accident" in the long sweep of history, and that humanity will sink back into its "natural state" of "tyranny and misery...
Capitalism's whole spirit is growth through adaptation to ceaseless change?in prices, profits, technology, consumer tastes. In fact, its intellectual history begins with Adam Smith's effort to explain why and how the natural instincts and capabilities of free men cause economies to change and progress. All this is worthy of being recalled today because it remains little understood...
...1890s, Henry C. Frick, after breaking a strike at the Carnegie Steel Works in Homestead, Pa., reduced wages and re-established an 84-hour work week. At the other end of the scale, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and other capitalists accumulated immense fortunes, in part because they proved Adam Smith wrong in thinking that an unregulated market could not be monopolized. In 1912, Woodrow Wilson, no radical, lamented that "we are all caught in a great economic system which is heartless...