Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 325 of Gordon Wood’s great 1991 book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution:

In the end, no banks, no government, no institutions could have created the American economic miracle of these years. America suddenly emerged a prosperous, scrambling, enterprising society not because the Constitution was created or because a few leaders formed a national bank, but because ordinary people, hundreds of thousands of them, began working harder to make money and “get ahead.” Americans seemed to be a people totally absorbed in the individual pursuit of money. “Enterprise,” “improvement,” and “energy” were everywhere extolled in the press.

DBx: Note that Wood could have added also that this growth was not due to protective tariffs.

Wood’s observation about American history lends further credence to Deirdre McCloskey’s thesis that pro-commercial ideas – and, importantly, favorable talking and writing about commerce and market-tested innovation – are the chief source of what Adam Smith called “the wealth of nations.”