43 Quotes by Nancy MacLean

By 1860, two of every three of the relatively few Americans whose wealth surpassed $100,000 lived below the Mason-Dixon Line. New York at that time had fewer millionaires per capita than Mississippi. South Carolina was the richest state in the Union. The source of southern wealth was staple crops—particularly cotton—produced by enslaved men, women, and children for world markets. So matchless were the profits that more money was invested in slaves than in industry and railroads.

Interestingly, these conclusions issued from purely abstract thought experiments, not from any research on political practice.

Koch believed that what the famed economist Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction" was so critical to the health of the capitalist system that empathy was an obstacle to acceptance of the world that must be brought into being.

The anti-government rhetoric that continues to saturate our political life is rooted in [support for] slavery rather than liberty. The paralyzing suspicion of government so much on display today, that is to say, came originally not from average people but from elite extremists such as [John C.] Calhoun who saw federal power as a menace to their system of racial slavery.

What we are seeing today is a new iteration of that very old impulse in America: the quest of some of the propertied (always, it bears noting, a particular ideological extreme —and some would say greedy— subsection of the propertied) to restrict the promise of democracy for the many, acting in the knowledge that the majority would choose other politics if it could

Both Buchanan and Calhoun[...] were concerned wit the "failure of democracy to preserve liberty

[...] Rothbard explained, was "that it was intervention of the State that in itself created the classes and the conflict", not the labor relations of the economy, as previous thinkers believed

What we are seeing today is a new iteration of that very old impulse in America: the quest of some of the propertied (always, it bears noting, a particularly ideologically extreme—and some would say greedy—subsection of the propertied) to restrict the promise of democracy for the many, acting in the knowledge that the majority would choose other policies if it could.

Socialism, as the Mont Pelerin Society members defined the term, was synonymous with any effort by citizens to get their government to act in ways that either cost money to support anything other than police and military functions or encroached on private property rights.