Industry entirely left to itself, would soon fall to ruin, and a nation letting everything alone would commit suicide.
Friedrich ListRead
Competition is the most promising means to achieve and secure prosperity. It alone enables people in their role of consumer to gain from economic progress. It ensures that all advantages which result from higher productivity may eventually be enjoyed.
Interpretation
Competition drives prosperity and benefits consumers through economic progress.
This quote by Ludwig Erhard highlights the importance of competition in the economic sphere, asserting that it is essential for achieving and maintaining prosperity. Competition not only incentivizes productivity but also ensures that consumers reap the benefits of advancements in the economy, leading to broader access to improved goods and services.
In practice
In a speech about the benefits of a free market economy.
Industry entirely left to itself, would soon fall to ruin, and a nation letting everything alone would commit suicide.
When a nation is over-reliant on one or two commodities like oil or precious minerals, corrupt government ministers and their dodgy associates hoard profits and taxes instead of properly allocating them to schools and hospitals.
People who think a tax boost will cure inflation are the same ones who believe another drink will cure a hangover.
If developed countries' citizens want to feel slightly better about their economies' slow growth and high unemployment, they should contemplate how much worse matters could be without the institutions that they have.
As our economy faces up to potential labour shortages due to our ageing population and as it moves to a new level of sophistication to compete with the rest of the world, we're going to need every Australian on board pulling their weight, rejoining the workforce, gaining new skills. Writing off individuals and communities suffering from poverty just creates a dead weight for our economy to drag along.
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.
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