The nineteenth-century liberals believed that abstinence was the key to wealth accumulation and thus economic development. Having acquired the fruits of their labour, people need to abstain from instant gratification and invest it, if they were to accumulate wealth. In this world view, the poor were poor because the did not have the character to exercise such abstinence. Therefore, if you gave the poor voting rights, they would want to maximize their current consumption, rather than investment, by imposing taxes on the rich and spending them. This might make the poor better off in the short run, but it would make them worse off in the long run by reducing investment and thus growth.

[...] Before the Golden Age, per capita income in the rich capitalist economies used to grow at 1-1.5 per cent per year. During the Golden Age, it grew at 2-3 per cent in the US and Britain, 4-5 per cent in Western Europe, and 8 per cent in Japan. Since then, these countries have never managed to grow faster than that.

[...] without subsidies from government or international donors, microfinance institutions have to charge, and have been charging, near-usurious rates. It has been revealed that the Grameen Bank could initially charge reasonable interest rates only because of the (hushed-up) subsidies it was getting from the Bangladeshi government and international donors. If they are not subsidized, microfinance institutions have to charge interest rates of typically 40-50 per cent for their loans, with rates as high as 80-100 per cent in countries such as Mexico. When, in the late 1990s, it came under pressure to give up the subsidies, the Grameen Bank had to relaunch itself (in 2001) and start charging interest rates of 40-50 per cent.

[...] what makes the poor countries poor is not the lack of raw individual entrepreneurial energy, which in fact they have in abundance. The point is that what really makes the rich countries rich is their ability to channel the individual entrepreneurial energy into collective entrepreneurship.

[...] Even when it comes to higher education, which is supposed to matter more in the knowledge economy, there is no simple relationship between it and economic growth. What really matters in the determination of national prosperity is not the educational levels of individuals but the nation's ability to organize individuals into enterprises with high productivity.

[...] evidence is emerging that, in defiance of the law, throughout the war GM secretly maintained its link with Opel, which built not only military cars but aircraft, landmines and torpedoes. So it seems that GM was arming both sides and profiting from it.

[...] all these actions [...] have ultimately not been good even for GM itself--unless you equate GM with its managers and a constantly changing group of shareholders. These managers drew absurdly high salaries by delivering higher profits by not investing for productivity growth while squeezing other weaker 'stakeholders'--their workers, supplier firms and the employees of those firms. They bought the acquiescence of shareholders by offering them dividends and share buybacks to such an extent that the company's future was jeopardized. The shareholders did not mind, and indeed many of them encouraged such practices, because most of them were floating shareholders who were not really concerned with the long-term future of the company because they could leave at a moment's notice (see Thing 2).

Sometimes regulations help businesses by limiting the ability of firms to engage in activities that bring them greater profits in the short run but ultimately destroy the common resource that all business firms need. For example, regulating the intensity of fish farming may reduce the profits of individual fish farms but help the fish-farming industry as a whole by preserving the quality of water that all the fish farms have to use. For another example, it may be in the interest of individual firms to employ children and lower their wage bills. However, a widespread use of child labour will lower the quality of the labour force in the longer run by stunting the physical and mental development of children. [...]

Businesses plan their activities--often down to the last detail. Indeed, that is where Marx got the idea of centrally planning the whole economy. When he talked about planning, there was in fact no real-life government that practising planning. At the time, only firms planned. What Marx predicted was that the 'rational' planning approach of the capitalist firms would eventually prove superior to the wasteful anarchy of the market and thus eventually be extended to the whole economy. To be sure, he criticized planning within the firm as despotism by capitalism, but he believed that, once private property was abolished and the capitalists eliminated, the rational elements of such despotism could be isolated and harnessed for the social good.

[...] Why should people who have worked hard and obtained a university degree against all odds be rewarded in the same way as someone, coming from the same poor background, who goes into a life of petty crime?

This argument is correct. We cannot, and should not, explain someone's performance only by the environment in which he has grown up. Individuals do have responsibilities for what they have made out of their lives.

However, while correct, this argument is only part of the story. Individuals are not born into a vacuum. The socio-economic environment they operate in puts serious restrictions on what they can do. Or even what they want to do. [...]