Look around, and you see everywhere the exertions and acts of individuals restricted, regulated, or promoted, on the principle of the common welfare.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes how individual actions are influenced by the broader social good.
Friedrich List highlights the relationship between individual efforts and the collective welfare of society. He suggests that the behaviors and choices of individuals are not made in a vacuum; rather, they are shaped by societal principles that promote the common good. This reflects the interconnectedness of personal ambitions and societal responsibilities, urging us to recognize that our actions affect not only ourselves but also the community at large.
In practice
In a speech about social responsibility, one might say, 'As Friedrich List pointed out, our actions are shaped by the principle of common welfare.'
It is bad policy to regulate everything... where things may better regulate themselves and can be better promoted by private exertions; but it is no less bad policy to let those things alone which can only be promoted by interfering social power.
An individual, in promoting his own interest, may injure the public interest; a nation, in promoting the general welfare, may check the interest of a part of its members.
Industry entirely left to itself, would soon fall to ruin, and a nation letting everything alone would commit suicide.
Because your brain uses information from the areas around the blind spot to make a reasonable guess about what the blind spot would see if only it weren't blind, and then your brain fills in the scene with this information. That's right, it invents things, creates things, makes stuff up! It doesn't consult you about this, doesn't seek your approval. It just makes its best guess about the nature of the missing information and proceeds to fill in the scene.
Our best built certainties are but sand-houses and subject to damage from any wind of doubt that blows
β¦but there they lay, sprawled across the field, craved far more by the vultures than by wives.
In the affluent society, no useful distinction can be made between luxuries and necessities.
In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
Whenever we moderns pause for a moment, and enter the silence, and listen very carefully, the glimmer of our deepest nature begins to shine forth, and we are introduced to the mysteries of the deep, the call of the within, the infinite radiance of a splendor that time and space forgot
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