Happy Birthday, Rosa Parks

With all respect and gratitude.

Later,

Thoughts for the Day, from Adam Smith

He wasn’t just about “the invisible hand of the marketplace;” he was also a moral thinker, particularly about the roles of business and government:

“[P]eople of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices . . .”

” . . . the mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind . . .”

“The government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatever.”

The Wealth of Nations

Later,

Langston Hughes

My soul has grown deep like the rivers . . .

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset….

Later,