John R. Commons Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

Other races of immigrants, by contact with our institutions, have been civilized—the negro has only been domesticated.

John R. Commons
The binding power of custom is its security of expectations. What has happened before may be expected to happen again, and he who arbitrarily disappoints expectations must be restrained or punished.

John R. Commons
It is an easy and patriotic matter for the lawyer, minister, professor, employer, or investor, placed above the arena of competition, to proclaim the equal right of all races to American opportunities; to avow his own willingness to give way should even a better Chinaman, Hindu, or Turk come in to take his place; and to rebuke the racial hatred of those who resist this displacement. His patriotism and world-wide brotherhood cost him and his family nothing, and indeed they add to his profits and leisure.

John R. Commons
The boot and shoe makers, either as shoemakers or cordwainers, have been the earliest and the most strenuous of American industrialists in their economic struggles. A highly skilled and intelligent class of tradesmen, widely scattered, easily menaced by commercial and industrial changes, they have resorted with determination at each new menace to the refuge of protective organizations.

John R. Commons
In the entire circuit of the globe those races which have developed under a tropical sun are found to be indolent and fickle. From the standpoint of survival of the fittest, such vices are virtues, for severe and continuous exertion under tropical conditions bring prostration and predisposition to disease. Therefore, if such races are to adopt that industrious life which is a second nature to races of the temperate zones, it is only through some form of compulsion. The negro could not possibly have found a place in American industry had he come as a free man.

John R. Commons
The 'liberty' of one is his permission to act as he pleases, supported against interference by the power of the concern or government
of which he is a member.

John R. Commons
Economic theory deals with two concepts, Value and Economy. Abstract reasoning regarding these concepts rests ultimately on mathematical concepts of quantity, time and energy. The three are inseparable, for quantity and time are dimensions of energy. The quantity relationships of energy, usually termed "statics," turn on the problem of the relation of the parts to the whole, while the time relationships, usually termed "dynamics," are the relations of a process that connects past, present and future.

John R. Commons
I do not overlook the important contributions to economic theory in the past whether orthodox or heterodox I correlate them with institutional economics. The classical and communistic economists used as their measure of value the man hour of labor. This is evidently since the incoming of scientific management the engineering economics of efficiency. The Austrian and hedonistic economists deriving from Bentham used as the measure of value the diminishing marginal utility of consumption goods. This is evidently the home economics recently introduced in the college curriculum.

John R. Commons
Since institutional economics is behavioristic, and the behavior in question is none other than the behavior of individuals while participating in transactions, institutional economics must make an analysis of the economic behavior of individuals.

John R. Commons
Legally, the term liberty means absence of duty, or rather the limit of duty.

John R. Commons
It would not be incorrect to say that all capital is invisible value, in that it is the present value, not of physical things, but of the hopes of the future aroused through confidence in the now invisible but expected transactions of the future.

John R. Commons
Historically, land taxes are commutations of physical rents into money-rents, and taxes are not something taken from private property by the sovereign, but property is sovereignty taken collectively from the King by his tenants.

John R. Commons
An institution is defined as collective action in control, liberation and expansion of individual action. Its forms are unorganized custom and organized going concerns. The individual action is participation in bargaining, managing and rationing

John R. Commons
While mere process of thinking is the process of habits, ideals, definitions, investigations, classifications, valuations and behavior, due process of thinking, which is due process of law, is the process of correct habits, right ideals, true definitions, sincere investigation, reasonable classification, reasonable value, and justice; whereas its opposite, undue process, is perverse habit, wrong ideals, double meanings, partial investigation, class legislation, confiscation and injustice.

John R. Commons
The concept of property itself had come up out of the common law and carried with it the idea of a natural, or common-law rights of liberty to acquire, use and dispose of physical things.

John R. Commons
Liberty is as much a matter of compulsion as duty, but where duty says to a person that he must or must not, liberty says to other persons that they must not interfere with that person, or that they even must help to prevent still other persons from interfering, if necessary.

John R. Commons
The aim of this volume is to work out an evolutionary and behavioristic, or rather volitional, theory of value. It was commenced thirty-five years ago at Johns Hopkins University under my stimulating teacher, Richard T. Ely.

John R. Commons
Liberty, as such, is only the negative of duty, the absence of restraint or compulsion.

John R. Commons
The smallest unit of the institutional economists is a unit of activity — a transaction, with its participants. Transactions intervene between the labor of the classic economists and the pleasures of the hedonic economists, simply because it is society that controls access to the forces of nature, and transactions are, not the "exchange of commodities," but the alienation and acquisition, between individuals, of the rights of property and liberty created by society, which must therefore be negotiated between the parties concerned before labor can produce, or consumers can consume, or commodities be physically exchanged.

John R. Commons
The Chinese and Japanese are perhaps the most industrious of all races, while the Chinese are the most docile. The Japanese excel in imitativeness, but are not as reliable as the Chinese. Neither race, so far as their immigrant representatives are concerned, possesses the originality and ingenuity which characterize the competent American and British mechanic.

John R. Commons
Liberty is absence of restraint. Freedom is participation in government.

John R. Commons