Disclosure: I don't invest and I pay little attention to either individual stocks or the markets in general; I just post the daily thread. And philosophically I lean far more to the socialist left than the capitalist center.
I don't select the quotes in advance, or even the source books. It's all done at the same time I post the thread in the afternoon, so I can pick something that at least a little bit pertains to the day's economic news and provides some food for thought on the subject.
Mill was, I think, more of a theorist than a practitioner, and how his theories apply 160 years later in a very, very different world economy requires adjustment. The burdens are different in a society where at least a substantial portion of the citizenry sees social justice as a worthy economic objective as compared to one in which poverty and its particular burdens were considered more an effect of individual moral lapses than the fault of a skewed economy. When you apply that kind of thinking to a national economy within a global economy that comprises other national economies with very different structures, you have to pull back and consider all the differences that impact those "burdens" and how to deal with them. I don't have the answers, but I think it's interesting to toss the questions out there.
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