Iron Law

Iron law may refer to:

  • Iron law of population, from Thomas Malthus' An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)
  • Iron law of wages, from Ferdinand Lassalle's Subsistence theory of wages (mid 19th century)
  • Iron law of oligarchy, from Michels' Political Parties
  • Iron law of prohibition, from Cohen's How the Narcs Created Crack
  • Iron Law of Bureaucracy, from Jerry Pournelle.

Famous quotes containing the words iron and/or law:

    “Along the iron veins that traverse the frame of our country, beat and flow the fiery pulses of its exertion, hotter and faster every hour. All vitality is concentrated through those throbbing arteries into the central cities; the country is passed over like a green sea by narrow bridges, and we are thrown back in continually closer crowds on the city gates.”
    —John Ruskin (1819–1900)

    “The very existence of government at all, infers inequality. The citizen who is preferred to office becomes the superior to those who are not, so long as he is the repository of power, and the child inherits the wealth of the parent as a controlling law of society.”
    —James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)