It only becomes relatively valuable when labor can make use of it to produce something valuable from it or by it.
Victoria C. Woodhull
The Public Record
Victoria Claflin Woodhull, later Victoria Woodhull Martin, was an American leader of the women's suffrage movement who ran for president of the United States in the 1872 election. While many historians and authors agree that Woodhull was the first woman to run for the presidency, some disagree with classifying it as a true candidacy because according to the Constitution she would have been too young to be president if elected.
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And no financial policy is more ruinous to the true interests of a whole country than that of a constantly changing commercial valuation upon either personal or real estate, excepting alone in the latter, when it becomes the location of…
No country can enjoy a series of years of uninterrupted commercial prosperity when that country has a circulating medium which can be affected by the manipulations of shrewd financiers for their own ends.
Of all practical questions that require immediate solution, none is of so much importance to man as this; and none more so to woman unless that of equality for herself is.
When analyzed and comprehended, the idea of a gold basis will forever depart from all progressive minds, and the impetus the new money system will thereby receive will never be checked until its science is developed into general national…
Even in this demonstration it is conclusively shown that the productive capacity of the country is the real measure of value, and that, finally, no matter how irrelevant the process of wealth and prices may have been to it, it is the power…
On the contrary, it is true that when the prices affixed to any kind of property are larger than its real capacity for production, it is an expansion which must at some time collapse, to the detriment of the holder.
It is one of the most fatal of commercial errors to suppose that large general prices are an evidence of prosperity.
One of the best results that would flow from this change of incentive would be, that no “Bubbles” could be palmed off on the unwary by “flash” advertising, which would burst at some future time, to the destruction of some deluded victims…
Speculation is that spirit which constantly saps the vitality of wealth, and, therefore, society has no greater nor more debasing enemy than speculation.
Production is the foundation of all wealth, and, consequently, to increase wealth, production must be increased.
It is a notorious, yet unappreciated fact, that speculative enterprises lie at the foundation of all financial disorder, for which, if a remedy can be provided, the very considerable talent and time which is now devoted to it would be…