Don Watkins > Quotes

“The true source of economic security is self-reliance and economic freedom—Social Security is immoral because it subverts both.”
― Don Watkins, Rooseveltcare: How Social Security is Sabotaging the Land of Self Reliance

“When an inner-city child is stuck in a school that doesn’t educate him, that is a tragedy. But the problem isn’t that other children get a better education—it’s that the government has created an educational system that often doesn’t educate, and that makes it virtually impossible for anyone but the affluent to seek out alternatives. Of”
― Don Watkins, Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality

“Wealth is not distributed by society: it is produced and traded by the people who create it. To distribute it, society would first have to seize it from the people who created it. This”
― Don Watkins, Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality

“We need to start by asking one very simple question: where does wealth come from? The answer, as we’ve seen, is that it is created, and so one man’s fortune does not come at anyone else’s expense. How is wealth created? By individual thought and effort. Morally, what an individual creates through his own thought and effort belongs to him. Politically, an individual can only exercise thought and effort if he is free. This is the individualist framework that’s required to defeat the campaign against economic inequality.”
― Don Watkins, Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality

“Today, more and more of the world is following our lead, with the result that billions around the globe have been liberated from poverty in recent decades: since 1981, the fraction of the earth’s population living on less than a dollar a day has dropped from over 40 percent to only 14 percent.23 This is an incredible achievement. Yet most of the people who wring their hands over economic inequality have been inexcusably silent about this feat.”
― Don Watkins, Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality

“One result of the federal government’s student financial aid programs is higher tuition costs at our nation’s colleges and universities.” Although paradoxical, this result could have been predicted from basic economic theory: when students can come up with more money for college, thanks to the government’s efforts, colleges can afford to increase their tuition. “The empirical evidence is consistent with that—federal loans, Pell grants, and other assistance programs result in higher tuition for students at our nation’s colleges and universities.”
― Don Watkins, Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality

“There is an inequality problem involved in cronyism, however: cronyism is an example of political inequality. It allows a privileged group of people to rob and shackle others using the power of the government.”
― Don Watkins, Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality

“The fact is that life is not a race: success in life isn’t determined by how well you do compared to other people. It’s determined by whether you are able to achieve whatever hopes and dreams you set for yourself: to build a great company, to write a great book, to excel as a computer programmer, to be a great teacher or a great plumber. None of that requires besting others; the favorable circumstances they enjoy can’t hold you back. Exactly the reverse is true.”
― Don Watkins, Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality

“Our life is our responsibility, and if we want something from other people, justice requires that we earn it through voluntary exchange. The bare fact that we want or need something from other people doesn’t give us a right to it. Other people are not our servants, and their job isn’t to spend their days and hours working for our benefit rather than their own.”
― Don Watkins, Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality

“The true source of economic security is self-reliance and economic freedom—Social Security is immoral because it subverts both. It sabotages the virtues that enable us to survive, prosper, and enjoy our lives—and the social system that lets us exercise those virtues.”
― Don Watkins, Rooseveltcare: How Social Security is Sabotaging the Land of Self Reliance

“Most inequality critics today are economists, journalists, politicians, policy wonks, or political commentators. But most of their ideas are derived from egalitarian philosophers: Rousseau, Marx, and their modern heirs—people like Nagel, Dworkin, Singer, Cohen, and above all Rawls.”
― Don Watkins, Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality

“hat are the effects of increasing minimum wages?” asks Paul Krugman. “Any Econ 101 student can tell you the answer: The higher wage reduces the quantity of labor demanded, and hence leads to unemployment.”
― Don Watkins, Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality

“And this, then, is the most important piece of advice for anyone who desires romance and hasn’t found it. Make yourself worthy of love. Build up your own soul. Perfect your character. Fill your life with values and ambition.”
― Don Watkins, Effective Egoism: An Individualist's Guide to Pride, Purpose, and the Pursuit of Happiness

“They have promised us protection from nature in exchange for letting them rule men. A self-reliant America would offer us protection from other men so that we are free to face the challenges of nature. That is what we should fight for, those of us who want to make the world a better place.”
― Don Watkins, Rooseveltcare: How Social Security is Sabotaging the Land of Self Reliance

“Some economic inequality critics go further and contend that there comes a point at which inequality undermines progress—and, by and large, they believe the United States has reached that point today. What do they base that conclusion on? There is no theoretical reason why differences in income or wealth should slow human progress. The notion that “spending drives the economy” and that rich people spend less than others isn’t a view seriously entertained by economists, who on the whole recognize that savings, investment, and innovation are what make us richer.”
― Don Watkins, Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality

“Philosopher Allan Bloom argues the point eloquently in The Closing of the American Mind, writing that idealism should have primacy in education, for man is a being who must take his orientation by his possible perfection…. As it now stands, students have powerful images of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing.10”
― Don Watkins, Effective Egoism: An Individualist's Guide to Pride, Purpose, and the Pursuit of Happiness

“As recently retired CEO Don Thompson pointed out, “Today at McDonald’s 60 percent of our franchisees—those that own restaurants in the U.S.—started as hourly employees.” (Thompson himself grew up in Chicago’s notorious Cabrini-Green housing project, and started his rise working behind a McDonald’s counter.)”
― Don Watkins, Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality

“We’re taught to think of the minimum wage as a mechanism for helping people earn more. What it actually does is prevent people from deciding for themselves what pay to accept. If you can’t find an employer to hire you at $7.25 an hour (the federal minimum wage as of this writing), then you are legally barred from accepting a lower-paying job.”
― Don Watkins, Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality

“Consequently, even many critics of economic inequality are hesitant to endorse the claim that inequality undermines growth. Paul Krugman, for instance, says that he is “a skeptic on the inequality-is-bad-for-performance proposition—not hard line against it, but worried that the evidence for some popular stories is weaker than I’d like.”
― Don Watkins, Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality

“When inequality alarmists like Krugman hold up the post-war era as a model, they are not doing so in the name of prosperity, or even “shared prosperity,” but economic equality—equality as an end in itself.”
― Don Watkins, Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality

“That’s what happened at Ford, for example. In 1914, Henry Ford famously raised his starting wage to $5 a day (nearly $120 in today’s dollars). He had to: turnover at Ford in 1913 had been 370 percent.37 In order to find and keep the workers who were assembling his increasingly profitable cars, Ford had to be willing to outbid his competitors (which included not only other car makers, but every other employer bidding for his prospective employees).”
― Don Watkins, Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality

“To achieve happiness you must cultivate self-esteem and a benevolent view of the universe—the view that you’re able to achieve happiness, worthy of the happiness you achieve, in a universe open to achievement.”
― Don Watkins, Effective Egoism: An Individualist's Guide to Pride, Purpose, and the Pursuit of Happiness

“Wealth is not distributed by society: it is produced and traded by the people who create it. To distribute it, society would first have to seize it from the people who created it.”
― Don Watkins, Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality

“At the root of your emotional mechanism is a view of yourself and the world. To achieve happiness you must cultivate self-esteem and a benevolent view of the universe—the view that you’re able to achieve happiness, worthy of the happiness you achieve, in a universe open to achievement.”
― Don Watkins, Effective Egoism: An Individualist's Guide to Pride, Purpose, and the Pursuit of Happiness

“A college student who wouldn’t have taken a McDonald’s job for $7.25 an hour may find it worthwhile at $10 an hour, leaving fewer opportunities for, say, an uneducated immigrant from South America.”
― Don Watkins, Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality

“Absent self-esteem, you cannot truly experience love. For the person of low self-esteem, love involves an irreconcilable conflict: the joy of love is rooted in visibility—a person who lacks self-esteem finds this kind of visibility intolerable. Love offers them a mirror—and they can’t stand their reflection.”
― Don Watkins, Effective Egoism: An Individualist's Guide to Pride, Purpose, and the Pursuit of Happiness

“One answer to that question comes from none other than leading inequality critic Robert Reich. In a 2007 Wall Street Journal column, Reich admitted that, “There’s an economic case for the stratospheric level of CEO pay,” namely the fact that “CEO pay has risen astronomically over [the last 40 years], but so have investor returns”
― Don Watkins, Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality

“All of these agencies were enormously active during the so-called laissez-faire era. As the former CEO of BB&T Bank John Allison notes, “Government spending alone . . . on financial regulations (not company bailouts) increased, in adjusted dollars, from $725 million in 1980 to $2.07 billion in 2007.”41 Meanwhile, between 1980 and 2009, for every one instance of financial deregulation, there were four instances of new financial regulation.42 It is one thing to claim that regulators didn’t do their job during the last few decades, or that the government should have placed even more regulatory restrictions on the financial industry—all that is debatable—but it is quite another thing to describe the last few decades as a time when financial markets were deregulated, let alone unregulated.43”
― Don Watkins, Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality

“The high taxes and regulatory burdens they favor have the effect of protecting established businesses. To accumulate a fortune requires earning a high rate of profit and continually reinvesting most of it in the business. The greater the tax burden, the harder this process becomes. In the same way that small investments can turn into big gains when compounded over time, even relatively small tax burdens can amount to enormous losses, since they too get compounded over time: the million dollars taxed away from a company today doesn’t just cost it a million dollars, but all the income that million dollars would have generated had the business been free to reinvest it. Regulations, meanwhile, impose substantial compliance costs on a business—costs that an established business with a bull pen of attorneys can more easily meet, but which can stop upstarts in their tracks.”
― Don Watkins, Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality

“As beings possessing reason, men “are all equal, and equals can have no right over each other,” wrote seventeenth-century English politician Algernon Sidney.26 Viewed from an Enlightenment perspective, individuals were not subjects who had a duty to bow to political and religious authorities. They were autonomous beings who possessed equal rights and should therefore be left free to think, to work, to trade, to pursue happiness and success here on earth.”
― Don Watkins, Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality