Ten Pillars of Economic Wisdom

Nothing in our material world can come from nowhere, nor can it be free: everything in our economy has a source, a destination and a cost that must be paid.

Because wages are the principal cost of everything, widespread wage increases, without corresponding increases in production, simply increase the cost of everybody's living.

Government is never a source of goods.  Everything produced is produced by the people, and everything that government gives to the people, it must first take from the people.

The greatest good for the greatest number means, in its material sense, the greatest goods for the greatest number which, in turn, means the greatest productivity per worker.

The only vaulable money that government has to spend is that money taxed or borrowed out of people's earnings.  When government decides to spend more than it has thus received, that extra unearned money is created out of nothing, through the banks, and when spent, takes on value only by reducing the value of all money, savings and insurance.

All productivity is based on three factors:

1. natural resources, whose form, place and condition are changed by the expenditure of 
   
2. human energy (both muscular and mental), and with the aid of 
   
3. tools.

In our modern exchange economy, all payroll and employment come from customers, and the only worthwhile job security is customer security; if there are no customers, there can be no payroll and no jobs.

Tools are the only one of these three factors that humans can increase without limit, and tools come into being in a free society only when there is a reward for the temporary self-denial that people must practice, in order to channel part of their earnings away from purchases that produce immediate comfort and pleasure, and into new tools of production.  Proper payment for the use of tools is essential to their creation.

Customer security can be achieved by the employee only by cooperating with management in doing things that win and hold customers.  Job security, therefore, is a partnership problem that can be solved only in a spirit of understanding and cooperation.

The productivity of the tools -- that is, the efficiency of the human energy applied in connection with their use -- has always been highest in a competitive society in which the economic decisions are made by millions of progress-seeking individuals, rather than in a state-planned society in which those decisions are made by a handful of all-powerful people, regardless of how well-meaning, unselfish, sincere and intelligent those people may be.