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Vito Tanzi
More books by Vito Tanzi…
“Until the time when intellectual capital could acquire property rights status and could benefit from government protection, “Americans saw [the] immense hoard of technology [being developed in Europe] as theirs for the asking – or for stealing” (Morris, 2012, p. 301). Morris mentions that Tench Coxe, who was Alexander Hamilton’s assistant treasury secretary in the first US Treasury Department, “had no compunction about offering awards for stolen British textile technology and paying bounties high enough to induce [British] craftsmen to risk prison for emigrating [to the US] with trade secrets” (ibid.). He added that “the United States set out to steal whatever [technological knowledge] it could” (ibid.).”
― Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality
― Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality
“A great deal of the talk about laissez faire [in the nineteenth century] must be discounted, or at least put into its proper context. In many cases the argument concealed an admission that a problem was insoluble, or that it must be endured, because no one could think of any method of solving it. From this point of view, the policy of laissez faire was not the result of a new and optimistic belief in the progress of society through private enterprise. It was rather an acknowledgement that the fund of skill and experience at the service of society was limited, and that, in the management of their common a airs, men would not be able to find the elasticity and adaptiveness [sic] which individuals showed in devising schemes for their own self-interest. e treatment of social and economic questions was more haphazard and empirical than Englishmen were ready to acknowledge. If a practical solution suggested itself, if a tentative experiment could be made, the doctrine of laissez faire would be thrust aside, only to be used again after another failure to discover the way out of a difficulty (Woodward, [1938] 1962 , p. 16).”
― Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality
― Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality
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