Louis Kelso’s “money-and-credit” system would use the central bank to distribute the ownership of new capital democratically and, thus, restore the economic autonomy that so many had lost. If everyone owned capital, each would be more free — less dependent on both concentrated wealth and the liberal welfare state…. [T]he Federal Reserve’s money-creation powers could be harnessed directly to the need for new capital, channeling low-interest credit to new enterprises, provided that the stock ownership of these companies was distributed broadly among workers and communities, indeed to all citizens. Instead of only buying government securities when it created money, the Fed would buy the debt paper of employee-owned or community-owned trusts, which financed the new capital formation. When the new ventures paid off the debts on their new machines and factories, the loan paper would be retired and ordinary citizens would hold title to the new capital stock. Over a generation or longer, without confiscating or nationalizing anyone’s property, the ownership of wealth would become more broadly distributed…. Like the sub-treasury plan [of the populists of the nineteenth century], there was no technical reason why Kelso’s scheme (or at least a modest version, could not be made to work compatibly with with the Fed’s other obligations to control the expansion of money and credit. But there were many political reasons. He was offering a new version of the political choice that American politics had always refused to make.” [ Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country , 1987, p.266.]
Might the simple maxim, that honesty is the best policy be laid to heart! Might a sense of the true aims of life elevate the tone of politics and trade, till public and private honor become identical!
If a man should register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from his youth, and so go on to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last.--_Swift._
Public opinion, or what passes for public opinion, is not invariably a moderating force in the jungle of politics. It may be true, and I suspect it is, that the mass of people everywhere are normally peace-loving and would accept many restraints and sacrifices in preference to the monstrous calamities of war. But I also suspect that what purports to be public opinion in most countries that consider themselves to have popular government is often not really the consensus of the feelings of the mass of the people at all, but rather the expression of the interests of special highly vocal minorities — politicians, commentators, and publicity-seekers of all sorts: people who live by their ability to draw attention to themselves and die, like fish out of water, if they are compelled to remain silent.
Every effort therefore must be made to perpetuate prosperity. And, since that is to the advantage of the rich as well as the poor, all that accrues from the revenues should be collected into a single fund and distributed in block grants to those in need, if possible in lump sums large enough for the acquisition of a small piece of land, but if not, enough to start a business, or work in agriculture. And if that cannot be done for all, the distribution might be by tribes or some other division each in turn. The rich meanwhile will contribute funds sufficient to provide pay for the necessary meetings, being themselves relieved of all frivolous public services. It has been by running their constitution on some such lines that the Carthaginians have secured the goodwill of their people. From time to time they send some of them to live in the outlying districts and turn them into men of substance. When the notables are wise and considerate, they also split up the poor into groups and make it their business to provide them with a start in some occupation. [ The Politics , Book VI, Chapter v, §1320a35.]
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
In the fact that hero-worship exists, has existed, and will for ever exist universally among mankind, mayest thou discern the cornerstone of living rock, whereon all politics for the remotest time may stand secure.
Administration: An ingenious abstraction in politics, designed to receive
Whether religion is a divisive or reconciling force depends on our certainty or our humility as we practice our faith in our politics. If we believe that we know God's truth and that we can embody that truth in a political agenda, we divid the realm of politics into those who are God's side, which is our side, and those with whom we disagree, who oppose the side of God. This is neither good religion nor good politics. It is not consistent with following a Lord who reached out to a variety of people — prostitutes, tax collectors, lepers. If politics is the art of compromise, certainty is not really politics, for how can one compromise with God's own truth? Reconciliation depends on acknowledging that God's truth is greater than our own, that we cannot reduce it to any political platform we create, no matter how committed we are to that platform, and that God's truth is large enough to accommodate the opinions of all kinds of people, even those with whom we strongly disagree.
Because nothing sells in the modern Christian marketplace like the notion that Christians are beset on all sides by powerful forces desperately in need of a good disemboweling, it was inevitable that religious marketing would flow into the country’s politics. And religion has been sold there solely as a product.
The first essential responsibility [of the state] is control of the market-place: there must be some official charged with the duty of seeing that honest dealing and good order prevail. For one of the well-nigh essential activities of all states is the buying and selling of goods to meet their mutual basic needs; this is the quickest way to self-sufficiency, which seems to be what moves men to combine under a single constitution. The Politics , Book VI, Chapter viii, §1321b4.
Vain hope to make people happy by politics!
In politics, If you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.
Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.
No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, the usages, and the arts of his times shall have no share.
There is no evasion of this moral responsibility of all the nations and especially of the most powerful nations for that peace and justice which, together with the security of one’s own nation, is the object of foreign policy. Too many people who eagerly draw up perfect blueprints for world organization are secretly influenced by the expectation that after the establishment of such legal institutions they will get rid of the continuous responsibility of a burdensome foreign policy. They have fallen into the same fallacy as the classical liberal economists, namely, that if a certain set of legal institutions should be introduced, then out of the individuals’ efforts to pursue their unrestricted self-interest the social harmony would automatically ensue. The result was, of course, not social harmony but the power struggle of collective interests, class struggles, and the like. If in the national order the merely legalistic concept of the state according to the liberal pattern is impossible, a complete juridification of the international order will be even less possible. On World Peace, Justice and Charity . Too many of the planners, moreover, have an optimistic though mechanistic psychology according to which man is the creature of his institutional environment, that is, he is a bundle of causal reactions to the primary acting environmental and objective institutional factors. But this psychology of determinism forgets that man is conditioned and motivated, but not causally determined, by these institutional factors. There remains a residual sphere beyond all causal determinations, where man is morally free and can become truly culpable, not innocently guilty as in the ancient tragedy. [Sophocles’ “Oedipus Trilogy”] Sometimes this over-all juridification is caused by a tacit rejection of man’s moral nature. And contradictions appear, such as this, that Hitler is wholly explained causally as the effect of causes that are sociological, institutional, and so on, and yet considered personally and morally guilty. Politics is an integral part of ethics, as is law. Arbitrary power must be controlled by positive law. But, that law may be enabled to do so, it must itself be backed by power responsible to the moral ideas, to the national common good. The strife among nations can be best settled if the universal law of morality, the principles of natural law as the unwritten constitution of the international community, are commonly accepted. For then power is put in the service of the fundamental moral ideas. And there is no evasion of the principle that the greater the power, influence, and prestige of a nation, the greater is its responsibility for peace and justice. Moreover, the less can this responsibility be shifted to any legal institution, however abstractly perfect, and the nation still hope to return securely to a splendid isolation and to the sole pursuit of its own national happiness. On the other hand, only after the powerful nations are ready to accept in mutual understanding their direct and inseparable responsibility for peace, only then will the legal institution work. But just as important is the perpetual will to establish justice, that is, to work for changes of the actual status quo when it has become an obviously unjust status, the continuation of which would endanger the peace of the world. Peace is the work of justice. Hence it will always be this moral will to justice that gives the legal institutions power. Without this moral will and concordant responsibility, the institutions will be empty hulks, a derision of the idea of law. Though peace, the tranquility of the order, is the work of justice, justice itself ought to be vivified by charity, based on the common brotherhood of men and on the common fatherhood of God. These three — charity vivifying justice, justice working peace, and peace being tranquility of the order — by permeating and inspiring the legal institutions, are the real guaranty for the peace of the world. [“World Peace”, The State in Catholic Thought , IV.xxxii.vii.]
Faith lived in the incognito is one which is located outside the criticism coming from society, from politics, from history, for the very reason that it has itself the vocation to be a source of criticism. It is faith (lived in the incognito) which triggers the issues for the others, which causes everything seemingly established to be placed in doubt, which drives a wedge into the world of false assurances.
All my life I’d been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine’s thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.
The social leaders who refuse to allow politics into society are as foreseeing as the soldiers who refuse to allow politics to permeate the army. Society is like the sexual appetite; one does not know at what forms of perversion it may not arrive, once we have allowed our choice to be dictated by aesthetic considerations.
We must speak first about the division of land and about those who cultivate it: who should they be and what kind of person? We do not agree with those who have said that property should be communally owned, but we do believe that there should be a friendly arrangement for its common use, and that none of the citizens should be without means of support. [ The Politics , Book VII, Chapter X, §1329b36.]
One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea. [ Physics and Politics.]
Superstition is certainly not the characteristic of this age. Yet some men are bigoted in politics who are infidels in religion.
"Do you think it's possible to discuss politics without preaching? Or just not for you?" SKB: "Not for me personally. I spent years and years and years studying intensely, carefully, putting a lot of time and energy and work into it. I therefore am convinced I know a lot. Even if I don't, I think I do. So I run into someone who makes, generally speaking, a dismissive remark, which shows that he has not put in anywhere near the time, energy and effort and study I have, and I turn into an arrogant, pompous asshole. So I'd rather not do that. That's why I just stay loose on it."
In the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don't know any better.
Nothing can be more fatal in politics than a preponderance of the philosophical, or in philosophy than a preponderance of the political, spirit.
Men pay most attention to what is their own: they care less for what is common; or, at any rate, they care for it only to the extent to which each is individually concerned. [ The Politics , Chapter III.]
~Fashion.~--Fashion is the great governor of this world. It presides not only in matters of dress and amusement, but in law, physic, politics, religion, and all other things of the gravest kind. Indeed, the wisest of men would be puzzled to give any better reason why particular forms in all these have been at certain times universally received, and at other times universally rejected, than that they were in or out of fashion.--_Fielding._
The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
Passion is passion. It's the excitement between the tedious spaces, and it doesn't matter where it's directed...It can be coins or sports or politics or horses or music or faith...the saddest people I've ever met in life are the ones who don't care deeply about anything at all.
I believe that what separates us all from one another is simply society itself, or, if you like, politics. This is what raises barriers between men, this is what creates misunderstanding. If I may be allowed to express myself paradoxically, I should say that the truest society, the authentic human community, is extra-social — a wider, deeper society, that which is revealed by our common anxieties, our desires, our secret nostalgias. The whole history of the world has been governed by nostalgias and anxieties, which political action does no more than reflect and interpret, very imperfectly. No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.
Conscience has no more to do with gallantry than it has with politics.
only one criterion mattered when picking a job—fast growth. When companies grow quickly, there are more things to do than there are people to do them. When companies grow more slowly or stop growing, there is less to do and too many people to not be doing them. Politics and stagnation set in, and everyone falters. He told me, “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask what seat. You just get on.
The more you observe politics, the more you've got to admit that each party is worse than the other.
Letting the other person feel that the idea is his or hers not only works in business and politics, it works in family life as well.
But Titus said, with his uncommon sense, When the Exclusion Bill was in suspense: "I hear a lion in the lobby roar; Say, Mr. Speaker, shall we shut the door And keep him there, or shall we let him in To try if we can turn him out again?"
I think everybody who has a brain should get involved in politics. Working within. Not criticizing it from the outside. Become an active participant, no matter how feeble you think the effort is.
In politics, merit is rewarded by the possessor being raised, like a target, to a position to be fired at.
Natural work democracy is politically neither "left" nor "right." It embraces anyone who does vital work; for this reason, its orientation is only and alone forward. It has no inherent intention of being against ideologies, including political ideologies. On the other hand, if it is to function, it will be forced to take a firm stand, on a factual basis, against any ideology or political party which puts irrational obstacles in its path. Yet, basically, work democracy is not "against," as is the rule with politics, but "for"; for the formulation and solution of concrete tasks.
"Why can't we ever attempt to solve a problem in this country without having
To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals.
His work was defined by emphasis on the subversiveness philosophy, which asks questions, as opposed to the self-satisfaction of politics, which believes it has answers and insists on them.
Property should be in a general sense common, but as a general rule private…. In well-ordered states, although every man has his own property, some things he will place at the disposal of his friends, while of others he shares the use of them. [ The Politics. ]
Women famed for their valour, their skill in politics or their learning, leave the duties of their own sex in order to invade the privileges of men's.
People ask me... "What do you still bring from Hawaii? How does it affect your character, how does it affect your politics?" I try to explain to them something about the Aloha Spirit. I try to explain to them this basic idea that we all have obligations to each other, that we're not alone, that if we see somebody who's in need we should help... that we look out for one another, that we deal with each other with courtesy and respect, and most importantly, that when you come from Hawaii, you start understanding that what's on the surface, what people look like — that doesn't determine who they are. And that the power and strength of diversity, the ability of people from everywhere … whether they're black or white, whether they're Japanese-Americans or Korean-Americans or Filipino-Americans or whatever they are, they are just Americans, that all of us can work together and all of us can join together to create a better country. And it's that spirit, that I'm absolutely convinced, is what America is looking for right now.
It is false that we are worthy of the love of others, it is unjust that we should desire it. If we were born reasonable and impartial, knowing ourselves and others, we should not give this bias to our will. But we are born with it; we are therefore born unjust, for all tends to self. This is contrary to all order. We should look to the general advantage, and the inclination to self is the beginning of all disorder, in war, in politics, in economy, and in man's own body.
Who knows not that truth is strong, next to the Almighty? She needs no politics, nor stratagems, nor licensings to make her victorious; those are the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power; give her but room and do not bind her when she sleeps.
Too austere a philosophy makes few wise men; too rigorous politics, few good subjects; and too hard a religion, few religious persons whose devotion is of long continuance.
We cannot think of Plato and Aristotle, save in professorial robes. They were honest men like others, laughing with their friends, and when they amused themselves with writing the _Laws_ or the _Politics_, they did it as a pastime. That part of their life was the least philosophic and the least serious; the most philosophic was to live simply and quietly. If they wrote on politics it was as though they were laying down rules for a madhouse, and if they made as though they were speaking of a great matter, it was because they knew that the madmen to whom they spoke fancied themselves kings and emperors. They entered into their views in order to make their folly as little harmful as possible.
We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind — mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.
The essential ingredient of politics is timing.
~Politics.~--It is the misfortune of all miscellaneous political combinations, that with the purest motives of their more generous members are ever mixed the most sordid interests and the fiercest passions of mean confederates.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
Chew the cud of politics.
The moral problem in politics responds to the distinctive nature of politics. In its central preoccupation with power, politics is set off from other spheres of human activity. The exercise of power over others — whether it is sought only as an indispensable means toward the achievement of some distant goal or as an end in itself — is the characteristic and distinguishing feature of politics. … Moreover, the instruments by which the power of government is exercised are not limited as is the “;politics” of any number of private organizations. When it is aimed at controlling the state, politics seeks to command an institution that asserts the right to exercise a monopoly of coercion — above all, physical coercion — over society. … It is the means characteristic of the pursuit of power that raises the moral issue at its most fundamental level. The primary function of morality in politics may be defined as the acceptance of restraints on the modes of group conflict in societies where, because of a scarcity of goods (wealth, power, status, etc.), men cannot fulfill all of their desires. [“Morality in American Politics,” The Washington Post , March 3, 1977, p. A2.]
Our problem today is not how to expropriate the expropriators but, rather, how to arrange matters so that the masses, dispossessed by industrial society in capitalist and socialist systems, can regain property. For this reason alone, the alternative between capitalism and socialism is false—not only because neither exists anywhere in its pure state anyhow, but because we have here twins, each wearing different hats. [Essay, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution” in Crises of the Republic, 1969 .]
Tools may be animate as well as inanimate; for instance, a ship’s captain uses a lifeless rudder, but a living man for watch; for a servant is, from the point of view of his craft, categorized as one of its tools. So any piece of property can be regarded as a tool enabling a man to live, and his property is an assemblage of such tools; a slave is a sort of living piece of property; and like any other servant is a tool in charge of other tools. For suppose that every tool we had could perform its task, either at our bidding or itself perceiving the need, and if—like the statues made by D?dalus or the tripods of Heph?stus, of which the poet says that “self-moved they enter the assembly of the gods” — shuttles in a loom could fly to and fro and a plectrum play a lyre all self-moved, then master-craftsmen would have no need of servants nor masters of slaves. [ The Politics . Book I, Chapter iv, §1253b23.]