simple people bear the weight of the world

It is not the multitude that serve and save the world but the righteous remnant that walk humbly before God. For the sake of ten the Lord was willing to spare Sodom, but they could not be found. (See Genesis 18:32.) Zarahemla narrowly escaped the fate of Sodom because of the few who were righteous. “Yea, wo unto this great city of Zarahemla; for behold, it is because of those who are righteous that it is saved…. Behold, if it were not for the righteous who are in this great city, behold, I would cause that fire should come down out of heaven and destroy it.” (Helaman 13:12-13.) 

Today as in the past God withholds his dreadful judgment for the sake of his Saints. The nations are not preserved by armaments and the threat of war, nor by economic power and technology. Before the God who made all things, these things are as reeds in the wind. The destroying angels are kept from their work by the lives of unknown people “who seek not for riches but for wisdom” (Doctrine and Covenants 6:7) and who try each day to serve the Lord….

Simple people bear the weight of the world.

The Lord’s Question: Thoughts on the Life of Response by Dennis Rasmussen. Brigham Young University Press. April 1985. Chapter Four, “Whom Shall I Send?” p.42, 43

the case of cotton

The case of cotton illustrates the hurdles that Africa has to surmount. Africa is the world’s third largest producer, turning out high-quality cotton at competitive prices. In West Africa cotton provides a living for a million farmers. Cotton production in francophone West Africa has soared from 100,000 tons a year at independence in 1960 to 900,000 tons. In Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali and Togo, cotton represents between 5 and 10 per cent of GDP, more than a third of export income and more than 60 per cent of agricultural export income. Production costs in West Africa are about 38 cents a pound. By comparison, production costs in the United States are more than twice as high. But the US provides its 25,000 cotton farmers with an annual subsidy of $4 billion – more than the value of the entire crop. US farmers have therefore been able to export cotton at one-third of what it costs them to produce. Over a period of fifteen years, they have gained nearly one-third of the world market. A study by Oxfam in 2002 calculated that, as a result of the US subsidy, the world price was 25 per cent lower than it would otherwise have been. It estimated that the cost to Burkina Faso was 1 per cent of its GDP or 12 per cent of its exports; to Mali, 1.7 per cent of GDP or 8 per cent of exports; and to Benin, 1.4 per cent of GDP or 9 per cent of exports. According to Oxfam, the trade losses associated with US farm subsidies that West Africa’s eight main cotton exporters suffered outweighed the benefits they received from US aid.


The Fate of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair by Martin Meredith. PublicAffairs. 2005.

commonly accepted ingredients

At least it seems safe to say that some form of representative government based on the principle of popular sovereignty and some form of market economy fueled by the energies of individual citizens have become the commonly accepted ingredients for national success throughout the world. These legacies are so familiar to us, we are so accustomed to taking their success for granted, that the era in which they were born cannot help but be remembered as a land of foregone conclusions.


Founding brothers: the revolutionary generation by Joseph J. Ellis. Vintage Books, 2000. p.4

purposeful and disinterested

The study of economics does not seem to require any specialized gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy or pure science? An easy subject, at which very few excel! The paradox finds its explanation, perhaps, in that the master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher - in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man's nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician.


John Maynard Keynes. The Worldly Philosophers: the lives, times and ideas of the great economic thinkers. By Robert L. Heilbroner. Revised Seventh Edition. 1999. P.285

child-workers in Bangladesh

In 1993, child-workers in Bangladesh were found to be producing clothing for Wal-Mart and Senator Tom Harkin proposed legislation banning imports from countries employing underage workers. The direct result was that Bangladeshi textile factories stopped employing children. But did the children go back to school? Did they return to happy homes? Not according to Oxfam, which found that the displaced child workers ended up in even worse jobs, or on the streets - and that a significant number were forced into prostitution.


Paul Krugman, Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science by Charles Wheelan. W.W. Norton & Company. 2002. P.202. Originally in Krugman's "Hearts and Heads," New York Times, April 22, 2001.

the gains from trade

The easiest way to appreciate the gains from trade is to imagine life without it. You would wake up early in a small, drafty house that you had built yourself. You would put clothes that you wove yourself after shearing the two sheep that graze in your backyard. Then you would pluck a few coffee beans off the scraggly tree that does not grow particularly well in Minneapolis - all the while hoping that your chicken had laid an egg overnight so that you might have something to eat for breakfast. The bottom line is that our standard of living is high because we are able to focus on the tasks that we do best and trade for everything else.


Charles Wheelan. Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science by Charles Wheelan. W.W. Norton & Company. 2002. P.188

The market is a tool, and a useful one. But the worship of this tool is a hollow faith. Far more important than any tool is what you make with it. Many of America's greatest accomplishments stand in complete defiance of the free market: the prohibition of child labor, the establishment of a minimum wage, the creation of wilderness areas and national parks, the construction of dams, bridges, roads, churches, schools, and universities. If all that mattered were the unfettered right to buy and sell, tainted food could not be kept off supermarket shelves, toxic waste could be dumped next door to elementary schools, and every American family could import an indentured servant (or two), paying them with meals instead of money.


Eric Schlosser. Author and correspondent for Atlantic Monthly. Fast Food Nation - The Dark Side of the All American Meal. By Eric Schlosser. 2001. p.260

The government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.


Ronald Reagan - (b. 1911), U.S. Republican politician, president. Address, 15 Aug. 1986, to the White House Conference on Small Business.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.


Adam Smith. Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science by Charles Wheelan. W.W. Norton & Company. 2002. P.27

PETITION OF THE MANUFACTURES OF CANDLES, WAXLIGHTS, LAMPS, CANDLESTICKS, STREET LAMPS, SNUFFERS, EXTINGUISHERS, AND OF THE PRODUCERS OF OIL, TALLOW, RESIN, ALCOHOL, AND GENERALLY EVERYTHING CONNECTED WITH LIGHTING

To Messieurs the Members of the Chamber of Deputies

Gentlemen,
. . . We are suffering from the intolerable competition of a foreign rival, placed, it would seem, in a condition so far superior to our own for the production of light, that he absolutely inundates our national market with it at a price fabulously reduced . . . . This rival . . . is no other than the sun.
What we pray for, is, that it may please you to pass a law ordering the shutting up of all windows, skylights, dormer-windows, outside and inside shutters, curtains, blinds, bull's-eyes; in a word of all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures.
. . . If you shut up as much as possible all access to natural light and create a demand for artificial light, which of our French manufacturers will not benefit by it?
. . . If more tallow is consumed, then there must be more oxen and sheep. . . if more oil is consumed, then we shall have extended cultivation of the poppy, of the olive. . . our heaths will be covered with resinous trees.
Make your choice, but be logical; for as long as you exclude, as you do, iron, corn, foreign fabrics, in proportion as their prices approximate to zero, what inconsistency it would be to admit the light of the sun, the price of which is already at zero during the entire day!


Frederic Bastiat. 1801-1850. French Economist. The Worldly Philosophers: the lives, times and ideas of the great economic thinkers. By Robert L. Heilbroner. Revised Seventh Edition. 1999. P.179, 180