The merchants will manage [commerce] the better, the more they are left free to manage for themselves.
Interpretation
Commerce flourishes best when merchants have the freedom to operate without excessive regulation.
This quote by Thomas Jefferson emphasizes the importance of free enterprise and the idea that merchants, when allowed to operate autonomously, can optimize their practices and enhance overall economic productivity. Jefferson advocates for a limited government role in business, suggesting that the natural abilities and decisions of merchants are best suited to advance commerce without interference.
In practice
This quote can be used in a business seminar to highlight the importance of entrepreneurship.
The firmness with which the (American) people have withstood the... abuses of the press, the discernment they have manifested between truth and falsehood, show that they may safely be trusted to hear everything true and false and to form a correct judgment between them.
I, place economy among the first & most important republican virtues, & public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared
βWe must make our choice between economy and liberty or confusion and servitude...If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labor and in our amusements...if we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.
Very many and very meritorious were the worthy patriots who assisted in bringing back our government to its republican tack. To preserve it in that, will require unremitting vigilance.
A nation, as a society, forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society.
Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.
Just as we should never balance the budget on the backs of the poor, so it is an economic delusion to think you can balance it only on the wallets of the rich.
We ask our companies to restructure; we ask employees to work more for less money because there is overproduction, but then we're unable to defend them from cheaper Chinese imports. We are insane.
THE CORRECTION, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.
I will not let anyone tell me we must spend more money. This crisis did not come about because we issued too little money but because we created economic growth with too much money and it was not sustainable growth.
Economic growth is the aggregate effect of the quest to accumulate capital and extract profit. Capitalism collapses without growth, yet perpetual growth on a finite planet leads inexorably to environmental calamity.
No amount of debt restructuring, even debt forgiveness, will help the Greeks achieve real prosperity. What they need is not short-term relief but, rather, a long-term cure.
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