The merchants will manage [commerce] the better, the more they are left free to manage for themselves.
Interpretation
Commerce flourishes best when merchants have the freedom to operate without excessive regulation.
This quote by Thomas Jefferson emphasizes the importance of free enterprise and the idea that merchants, when allowed to operate autonomously, can optimize their practices and enhance overall economic productivity. Jefferson advocates for a limited government role in business, suggesting that the natural abilities and decisions of merchants are best suited to advance commerce without interference.
In practice
This quote can be used in a business seminar to highlight the importance of entrepreneurship.
The firmness with which the (American) people have withstood the... abuses of the press, the discernment they have manifested between truth and falsehood, show that they may safely be trusted to hear everything true and false and to form a correct judgment between them.
I, place economy among the first & most important republican virtues, & public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared
βWe must make our choice between economy and liberty or confusion and servitude...If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labor and in our amusements...if we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.
Very many and very meritorious were the worthy patriots who assisted in bringing back our government to its republican tack. To preserve it in that, will require unremitting vigilance.
A nation, as a society, forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society.
Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.
For most Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport.
So Europe needs to be competitive and we also need to be competitive if we wish to remain an interesting economic partner for the United States. This has to be done on the basis of strength, of competitiveness.
The great thing about fiscal policy is that it has a direct impact and doesn't require you to bind the hands of future policymakers.
Constructive trade, the two-way exchange of goods and services, is the most efficient and logical way for each nation . . . to build a stable prosperity, a prosperity based not on aid, but on mutually beneficial economic contacts.
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.
That's the world we live in: when it comes to economics, people have emotions; it's not like chemistry or physics.
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