“Love actually is a great act of the will. It's when I say, "I desire your good, not for my sake but for yours". To love is to break out of the black hole of the ego and say, "My life is about you".”
― Bishop Robert Barron
“One of the most fundamental problems in the spiritual order is that we sense within ourselves the hunger for God, but we attempt to satisfy it with some created good that is less than God. Thomas Aquinas said that the four typical substitutes for God are wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. Sensing the void within, we attempt to fill it up with some combination of these four things, but only by emptying out the self in love can we make the space for God to fill us. The classical tradition referred to this errant desire as "concupiscence," but I believe that we could neatly express the same idea with the more contemporary term "addiction." When we try to satisfy the hunger for God with something less than God, we will naturally be frustrated, and then in our frustration, we will convince ourselves that we need more of that finite good, so we will struggle to achieve it, only to find ourselves again, necessarily, dissatisfied. At this point, a sort of spiritual panic sets in, and we can find ourselves turning obsessively around this creaturely good that can never in principle make us happy.”
― Bishop Robert Barron
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
“Is it fair for those of us who live comfortably to impose our prefernces on individuals in the developing world? Economist argue that it is not, though we do it all the time. ... It is simply bad economics to impose our prefernces on individuals whose lives are much, much different”
― Charles Wheelan
“Maximising uility is not synonymous with acting selfishly.”
"Why did the entreprenuer cross the road? Becausehe could make more money on the other side."
― Charles Wheelan
“...firms try to make as much money as possible..”
"Why did the chicken cross the road? Because it maximised his utility."
― Charles Wheelan
“Time is our most scarce resource."
― Charles Wheelan
“The real cost of something is hat you must give up in order to get it ..."
― Charles Wheelan
“One powerful feature of a market economy is that it directs resources to their most productive use."
― Charles Wheelan
“Price Descrimination: People will pay more for their own medicine than they will for their pet's."
― Charles Wheelan
The market economy is a powerful force for making our lives better.
How many world leaders fly to North Korea when they need open-heart surgery?
The market is imoral
The market does not provide goods that we need; it provides goods that we want to buy.
(Our medical system does not provide health insurance to the poor. Why? Because they can't pay for it.
Our system used prices to allocate scarce resources.
The most basic function of any economic system is to decide who gets what. Capitalism and communism both raton goods. We do it with prices; the Soviets did it by waiting in line.
Because we use price to allocate goods, most markets are self correcting.
If we fix prices in a market system, private firms will find some other way to compete.
Every market transaction makes all parties better off.
The problem with Asian sweatshops is that there are not enough of them.
True., there is no way to rationalize spending money on a birthday cake for my dog when the same money could have vaccinated several African children. But any system that forces me to spend money on vaccines instead of doggy birthday cakes can only be held together by oppression.
During the twentieth century, communist governments killed some 100 million of their own people in peactime, either by repression or by famine.
We work harder when we benefit directly from our work.
― Charles Wheelan
“... the black rhino is worth far more dead than alive to the people of impoverished southern Africa."
"Communial resources ... present some unique problems."
― Charles Wheelan
“The pay of American teachers is not linked in any way to performance;Teachers' unions have consistantly opposed any kind of merit pay. Instead, salaries in nearly every public school district in the country are determined by a rigid formula based on experience and years of schooling, factors that researchers have found to be generally unrelated to performance in the classroom."
"Adverse Selection: Any system that pays all teachers the same provides a strong incentive for the most talented among them to look for work elsewhere."
― Charles Wheelan
“...Competition means losers, which goeas a long way to explain why we embrace it heartily in theory and then often fight it bitterly in practice."
― Charles Wheelan
“We know that people seek to make themselves better off, however they may define that."
― Charles Wheelan
“One crucial role for government in a market economy is dealing with externalities - those cases in which individuals or firms engage in private behavior that has broader social consequences."
― Charles Wheelan
“Good government makes a market economy possible. Period."
― Charles Wheelan
“It is difficult, if not impssible, to get a conventional home mortgage on an Indian reservation because the land is owned communally ... What that means to a commercial bank is that a mortgage that has fallen delinquent cannot be foreclosed."
― Charles Wheelan
“We measure our well-being in terms of utility, which is a theoretical concept, not a measurement tool that can be quantified, compared among individuals, or aggregated for the nation."
― Charles Wheelan
“The private sector allocates resources where they will earn the highest return.
Markets work because resources flow to where they are valued most. Government regulation inherently interfers with that process."
― Charles Wheelan
“... we ought to reject the grossly oversimplified argument that any chemical that harms the environment should be banned."
― Charles Wheelan
“Taxation discourages both work and investment."
― Charles Wheelan
“Every McDonald's hamburger tastes the same, whether it is sold in Moscow, Mexico City, or Cincinnati."
"McDonald's sells hamburgers, fries, and, most importantly, predictability."
― Charles Wheelan
“We are taught from a young age that one should never judge a book by its cover. But we must; it is often all we get to see."
― Charles Wheelan
No one knows how many species of organisms have existed since life began. Thirty billion is a commonly cited figure, but the number has been put as high as 4,000 billion. Whatever the actual total, 99.99 percent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us.
. --- Bill Bryson
Despite half a century of further study, we are no nearer to synthesizing life today that we were in 1953 and much further away from thinking we can.
. --- Bill Bryson
Fog – which is, after all, nothing more than a cloud that lacks the will to fly.
. --- Bill Bryson
The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were comming.
. --- Freeman Dyson
We live in a world that doesn’t altogether seem to want us here.
. --- Bill Bryson
… we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distance we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.
. --- Bill Bryson
In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.
. --- Augustine of Hippo
Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.
. --- Elizabeth Barrett Browning