Look around, and you see everywhere the exertions and acts of individuals restricted, regulated, or promoted, on the principle of the common welfare.
Friedrich ListRead
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.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the balance needed between regulation and private initiative in society.
Friedrich List's quote reflects the idea that while it is unwise to overregulate aspects of society that are capable of self-regulation, it is equally misguided to ignore areas where social intervention is necessary. He highlights the importance of discerning where state involvement can foster better outcomes, contrasting it with the dangers of excessive interference.
In practice
This quote can be used in a debate about government policies and their impact on private businesses.
Look around, and you see everywhere the exertions and acts of individuals restricted, regulated, or promoted, on the principle of the common welfare.
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.
I'm not one of those guys that has a great worldview. I kind of deal with terror and fear and isolation and abandonment.
Part of the oncoming demise (of New York during its terrible fiscal crisis) is that none of us can simply believe it. We were always the best and the strongest of cities, and our people were vital to the teeth. Knock them down eight times and they would get up with that look in the eye which suggests the fight has barely begun.
My films are expressive of a culture that has had the possibility of attaining material fulfillment while at the same time finding itself unable to accomplish the simple business of conducting human lives. We have been sold a bill of goods as a substitute for life. What is needed is reassurance in human emotions; a re-evaluation of our emotional capacities.
A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war.
Not, not mine: it's somebody else's wound; I could never have borne it. So take the thing that happened, hide it, stick it in the ground; whisk the lamps away.
I don't think I understood the full extent of the trauma experienced by people who churn through America's prisons until I began taking the time to listen to their stories.
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