Word: capitalist
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British Historian Arnold 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...
...more than pin down and define the rationalist, antiauthoritarian ideas that were in the air 200 years ago. But Smith did that with such mastery that he produced the world's first complete and coherent theory of economic behavior, establishing the starting point for all subsequent capitalist thought...
...necessary to keep themselves and their families alive. If they temporarily should earn more, they would breed so many children that competition for jobs eventually would drive wages down again. Ricardo did not think that this state of affairs was desirable?only inevitable. Nonetheless, he and Malthus earned for capitalist economics a name that it has never shaken; Thomas Carlyle had them in mind when he referred to "Respectable Professors of the Dismal Science...
...fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of appendage of a machine." In The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Frederick Engels conceded that capitalism "has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together." Nonetheless, Marx prophesied that capitalism would destroy itself: "Capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation...
...cope with the malaise. Much of the explosive 1973-74 inflation, of course, resulted from what economists call "random shocks" to the system: oil price gouging by the OPEC cartel and food shortages caused largely by unusual weather. But the underlying inflationary momentum seems to be supplied by modern capitalist democracy...