Capital investment in fixed assets that produce real goods is the actual driver of long term economic growth, and until slick financiers hijacked the country with 'new economy' mumbo-jumbo based on computer models and hype most Americans understood this.
One of the tax systems in the US is for wage earners. The government takes money from them out of each paycheck - so it knows how much they make, and those workers can't cheat to any significant degree. But the other tax system is for capital. Those with capital get to tell the government what they want to tell. They may get audited, but if their tax returns are of any size the government doesn't have enough of the smart auditors to figure out what's really going on. And there are the rules that allow you to do things like take in money today and pay taxes on it thirty years from now.
The way to build long-term returns is through preservation of capital and home runs.
In a world where technology and capital are highly transferable, there is a real risk that comparative advantage comes to be defined as whose labor force will work for the lowest wage.
A strong currency means that American consumers and businesses can buy imported goods and services more cheaply and that inflation and interest rates will be lower,. . . It also puts pressure on American industry to increase productivity and competitiveness. These benefits can feed on themselves as foreign capital flows in more readily because of greater confidence in our currency. A weak dollar would have the contrary effects.
Capital punishment, that thing scares me, it really does. I was talking to my friend about the electric chair, and he starts freakin' out. He's like 'the electric chair? That's too good for these people. That's too good for them'. Alright, how do we make the electric chair worse? How about this? They have to pedal a car battery to their own head. Is that ok? Is that enough, Mr. Hitler?
I was elected to come to an incredibly dysfunctional capital and make the government work better, and that's what I'm doing.
One of the crucial underpinnings of New York as a culture capital is that there are multiple markets. There is not just one art gallery district, there are several art gallery districts. I feel that there should be art galleries and art studios in every neighborhood without exception. They should be integrated into the social and physical fabric of the streets. If we want a lively city, we can't just have high towers and dense constructions, we have to have living organisms of streets and neighborhoods. And the arts are a crucial part of that.
I'd love if people relearned the lessons of the 20th century all over again. Which is to say this country progressed economically and socially when we had a better balance between capital and labor. Neither capital or labor won every argument. The battle between the two created economic tension, and transformed the working class into the middle class, and grew the economy.
Foreign capital to build new cinemas will help modernize China's aging cinema infrastructure, attract Chinese consumers back into cinemas, and increase demand for U. S. films.
All of Chinese thinking - Confucianism, Taoism, as well as Buddhism - contains the idea that in the course of life, man will shape harmoniously those psychic and physical predispositions that he received as capital assets by unifying them and giving them form from within a center.
Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil. Capital in some form or other will always be needed.
One of the first things that surprised me in a positive, wonderfully positive way, is that this works - patient capital works.
Do not let emotions fluctuate with the up and down of your capital.
Instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.
Capital punishment kills immediately, whereas lifetime imprisonment does so slowly. Which executioner is more humane? The one whokills you in a few minutes, or the one who wrests your life from you in the course of many years?
Time is your total capital, and the minutes of your life are painfully few.
I think the development of the venture capital system has been an example of something which is a successful improvement in risk-bearing. It doesn't exactly remove the risks at the beginning, but at least creates greater rewards at a slightly later stage and therefore encourages, say, small companies to engage in technologically risky enterprises.
Friendship lives on its income, love devours its capital.
For venture capital, one of the original principles is people you want to invest in are people who've done it before with someone else's money. Not people who've just came out of business school.