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.
You seek identity in the midst of indistinguishab le chaos, in sprawling nameless reality.
I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself from above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man.
Perhaps someone will have seen mine, the one Iβm waiting for, just as I saw him, in a ditch when his hands were making their last appeal and his eyes no longer could see. Someone who will never know what that man was to me; someone whose name Iβll never know.
The question of how things will settle down is the only important question.
The child is father of the man: And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.
Romans, countrymen, and lovers, hear me for my cause, and be silent, that you may hear.
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