-Ayn Rand, “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: Signet, 1967), p. 48.
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- “What is economic power? It is the power to produce and to trade what one has produced. In a free economy, where no man or group of men can use physical coercion against anyone, economic power can be achieved only by voluntary means: by the voluntary choice and agreement of all those who participate in the process of production and trade…A man can grow rich only if he is able to offer better values—better products or services, at a lower price—than others are able to offer.”
- “Businessmen are the one group that distinguishes capitalism and the American way of life from the totalitarian statism that is swallowing the rest of the world. All the other social groups—workers, farmers, professional men, scientists, soldiers—exist under dictatorships, even though they exist in chains, in terror, in misery, and in progressive self-destruction. But there is no such group as businessmen under a dictatorship. Their place is taken by armed thugs: by bureaucrats and commissars. Businessmen are the symbol of a free society—the symbol of America. If and when they perish, civilization will perish. But if you wish to fight for freedom, you must begin by fighting for its unrewarded, unrecognized, unacknowledged, yet best representatives—the American businessmen.”
- “There is no way to legislate competition; there are no standards by which one could define who should compete with whom, how many competitors should exist in any given field, what should be their relative strength or their so-called ‘relevant markets,’ what prices they should charge, what methods of competition are ‘fair’ or ‘unfair.’ None of these can be answered, because these precisely are the questions that can be answered only by the mechanism of a free market.”
- “Progress cannot be achieved by forced privations, by squeezing a ‘social surplus’ out of starving victims. Progress can come only out of individual surplus, i.e., from the work, the energy, the creative over-abundance of those men whose ability produces more than their personal consumption requires, those who are intellectually and financially able to seek the new, to improve on the known, to move forward.”
- “If some men do not choose to think, they can survive only by imitating and repeating a routine of work discovered by others-but those others had to discover it, or none would have survived. If some men do not choose to think or to work, they can survive (temporarily) only by looting the goods produced by others-but those others had to produce them, or none would have survived.”