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Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism QUOTES

Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism QUOTES

1 " The progressive intellectuals and their followers are in awe of what they think they might accomplish through the use of government power. They might benefit if they stopped to smell the roses. Like the rest of the natural world, what real life in a free environment actually accomplishes is much more awesome. "

― Lawrence W. Reed , Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism

2 " other words, the meaningful conversation we should be having is about absolute poverty, not relative poverty. In so many of the discussions about income inequality, "

― Lawrence W. Reed , Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism

3 " Socialist historian Gabriel Kolko, who argues in The Triumph of Conservatism that the forces of competition in the free market of the late 1800s were too potent to allow Standard to cheat the public, stresses that “Standard treated the consumer with deference. Crude and refined oil prices for consumers declined during the period Standard exercised greatest control of the industry.” Standard "

― Lawrence W. Reed , Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism

4 " In summary, let me quote Professor McGee once again:           Judging from the Record, Standard Oil did not use predatory price discrimination to drive out competing refiners, nor did its pricing practice have that effect . . . I am convinced that Standard did not systematically, if ever, use local price cutting in retailing, or anywhere else, to reduce competition. To do so would have been foolish; and, whatever else has been said about them, the old Standard organization was seldom criticized for making less money when it could readily have made more. A "

― Lawrence W. Reed , Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism

5 " Rexford Guy Tugwell, one of the architects of Franklin Roosevelt’s policies of the 1930s, explained, “We didn’t admit it at the time, but practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started.” To "

― Lawrence W. Reed , Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism

6 " Can any serious scholar observe the Hoover administration’s massive economic intervention and, with a straight face, pronounce the inevitably deleterious effects as the fault of free markets? Franklin "

― Lawrence W. Reed , Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism

7 " Roosevelt secured passage of the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), which levied a new tax on agricultural processors and used the revenue to supervise the wholesale destruction of valuable crops and cattle. Federal agents oversaw the ugly spectacle of perfectly good fields of cotton, wheat, and corn being plowed under. Healthy cattle, sheep, and pigs by the millions were slaughtered and buried in mass graves. Even if the AAA had helped farmers by curtailing supplies and raising prices, it could have done so only by hurting millions of others who had to pay those prices or make do with less to eat. Perhaps "

― Lawrence W. Reed , Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism

8 " •  The Hoover administration took a recession and made it a depression by dramatically choking off world trade through higher tariffs and doubling the income tax        •  Franklin Roosevelt promised to undo Hoover’s spending and tax increases but after he was elected, he did just the opposite        • "

― Lawrence W. Reed , Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism