Background
His father, John Benn, was a politician, who had been made a baronet in 1914. Benn was born in Oxted, Surrey.
(LARGE PRINT EDITION! More at LargePrintLiberty.com. "E...)
LARGE PRINT EDITION! More at LargePrintLiberty.com. "Everybody is now talking business, except the businessman. The politicians, the doctrinaires, the parsons, the long-haired youths and short-haired maidens from the Universities, all have fixed views on industrial and commercial questions. Most of them are prepared to explain at a moment's notice how any piece of business should be conducted. From the smaller details right up to the higher organisation of industry there is nothing upon which they are not ready to express an opinion, the view expressed being, generally speaking, the more definite and exact in inverse ratio to the experience of its author. In all this dicussion the business man is silent."
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His father, John Benn, was a politician, who had been made a baronet in 1914. Benn was born in Oxted, Surrey.
He attended the Central Foundation Boys" School.
He was an uncle of the Labour politician Tony Benn. As a civil servant in the Ministry of Munitions and Reconstruction during the First World War he came to believe in the benefits of state intervention in the economy. In the mid-1920s, however, he changed his mind and adopted "the principles of undiluted laissez-faire".
His The Confessions of a Capitalist was originally published in 1925 and was still in print twenty years later after selling a quarter of a million copies.
In it he rejected the labour theory of value and argued that wealth is a by-product of exchange. Benn admired Samuel Smiles and in a letter to The Times Benn claimed ideological descent from leading classical liberals:
In the ideal state of affairs, no one would record a vote in an election until he or she had read the eleven volumes of Jeremy Bentham and the whole of the works of John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and Bastiat as well as Morley"s Life of Cobden.
Benn was also a principal and manager of the publishing firm Benn Brothers, later Ernest Benn, Limited.
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble. Finding it everywhere, diagnosing it wrongly, and applying unsuitable remedies.".
This quote is often misattributed to Groucho Marx, with slightly different wording.
lieutenant may have been quoted by Marx.
(LARGE PRINT EDITION! More at LargePrintLiberty.com. "E...)
From his conversion to classical liberalism in the mid-1920s until his death in 1954 Benn published over twenty books and an equivalent amount of pamphlets propagating his ideas.
Quotations:
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble. Finding it everywhere, diagnosing it wrongly, and applying unsuitable remedies.". This quote is often misattributed to Groucho Marx, with slightly different wording.
lieutenant may have been quoted by Marx.