It doesn’t matter what we charge, unless others to agree to pay it.
Virtually everyone would prefer to get a higher price for what he sells and pay a lower
price for what he buys.
The history of most great American fortunes—Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie,
etc.—suggests that the way to amass vast amounts of wealth is to figure out some way to
provide goods and services at lower prices, not higher prices.
When Richard Sears tried to overtake Montgomery Ward, he did it, not because he did
not have enough money to live on, but because he wanted more. If that is our definition
of “greed,” then he was greedy.
Realistically speaking, do keep in mind that when prices go up, it is far more likely to be
due to supply and demand than to greed.
Genuine plunder of one nation or people by another has been all too common throughout human history. During the era before the First World War, when Germany had colonies in Africa, only 4 of its 22 enterprises with cocoa plantations there paid dividends, as did only 8 of 58 rubber plantations and only 3 out of 49 diamond mining companies. At the height of the British Empire in the early twentieth century, the British invested more in the United States than in all of Asia and Africa put together. Quite simply, there was more wealth to be made from rich countries than from poor countries. For similar reasons, throughout most of the twentieth century the United States invested more in Canada than in Asia and Africa put together. Only the rise of prosperous Asian industrial nations in the latter part of the twentieth century attracted more American investors in that part of the world. Perhaps the strongest evidence against the economic significance of colonies in the modern world is tha...
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