It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens and whilst the former is sometimes denounced as being but a means to the latter, sometimes at least it is an alternative.
Interpretation
It's preferable for a person to control their wealth rather than impose authority over others, as wealth can sometimes provide an alternate means of influence.
This quote expresses the idea that managing one's financial resources is a more ethical and preferable way to exert power than dominating or controlling other individuals. It highlights the potential for wealth to serve as a non-oppressive form of influence, distinguishing monetary power from coercive authority over people's lives.
In practice
During a lecture on economic ethics, I cited Keynes to illustrate the moral implications of wealth management.
As time goes on, I get more and more convinced that the right method of investment is to put fairly large sums into enterprises which one thinks one knows something about and in the management of which one thoroughly believes.
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.
The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.
We will not have any more crashes in our time.
This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.
The book, as it stands, seems to me to be one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read, with scarcely a sound proposition in it beginning with page 45 [Hayek provided historical background up to page 45; after that came his theoretical model], and yet it remains a book of some interest, which is likely to leave its mark on the mind of the reader. It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam.
I think one of the most important facts of basic income would be that it's not only a redistribution of income, but also of power. So the cleaners and bin men would have a lot more bargaining power.
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
The modern corporation must manufacture not only goods but the desire for the goods it manufactures.
I think if you look back through time, the history of income, wealth and taxation is full of surprise. So I am not terribly impressed by those who know in advance what will or will not happen.
The interests of the IMF represent the big international interests that today seem to be established and concentrated in Wall Street.
The Middle East has the highest unemployment percentage of any region in the world we have the largest youth cohort of history coming into the market place that frustration does translate into the political sphere when people are hungry and without jobs.
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