#250 YEARS: "America’s abundance was not created by public sacrifices to 'the common good,' but by the productive genius of free men"

"America’s abundance was not created by public sacrifices to 'the common good,' but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America’s industrialisation. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance — and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way."

~ Ayn Rand from her essay 'Theory and Practice,' collected in her book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

Envy

"Socialism is driven by envy of the rich, not concern for the poor."

~ paraphrased from George Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier

"[The envious] do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself. '''

~ Ayn Rand from 'Galt's Speech'

"This is the engine that's lifting humanity out. The entrepreneurs are the drivers of that engine."

"Capitalism created the possibility of the win-win-win. It used to be a zero sum game where somebody won, somebody else lost.  

"It was never a zero-sum game in my mind. You’re always trading with your customers and your employees and your suppliers for mutual benefit, mutual gain. That’s the miracle of capitalism. That’s why humanity has been lifted out of the dirt in the last 250 years. The Industrial Revolution led humanity out of this trap that we were in, which really was a zero-sum game. ...

"The biggest mistake people make, intellectuals in particular, they still think we're in a zero sum world. They're obsessed with some billionaires because Bernie Sanders thinks that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk somehow stole the money from the people. 

"They don't understand that it's this prosperity machine that's creating more, not just for those billionaires, but for everything that they're touching. They're creating value for their customers, they're creating value for their employees. Their suppliers are flourishing, their investors are seeing their capital go up. It can be reinvested and compound. 

"All philanthropy ultimately comes from business. That's where the profits are. Where do all the taxes come from? It ultimately comes from business as well. 

"This is the engine that's lifting humanity out. The entrepreneurs are the drivers of that engine. Somebody like Elon Musk, he gets a very, very, very tiny sliver of the value that he creates for the whole world."

~ Whole Foods founder John Mackey on the Win-Win Mentality That Lifted Humanity Out of the Dirt [hat tip David Senra]