Capitalism Quotes - Page 4

• Capitalism is not about free competitive choices among people who are reasonably equal in their buying and selling of economic power, it is about concentrating capital, concentrating economic power in very few hands using that power to trash everyone who gets in their way.

  David Korten

  Hands, People, Choices

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• Today, you have 20 percent of the world controlling 80 percent of the Gross Domestic Product; you've got a $30 trillion (US) world economy, and $24 trillion of it is in the developed countries... These inequities can't exist. So if you are talking about systemic breakdown, I think you have to look in terms of social breakdown.

  James Wolfensohn

  Country, Thinking, Talking

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• Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class.

  Al Capone

  Class, Mafia, Bootlegging

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• Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid-twentieth century.

  Noam Chomsky

  Technology, Practice, Political

  Noam Chomsky (2010). “The Chomsky Reader”, p.153, Pantheon

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• Capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering, of this irrational impulse. But capitalism is identical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering, of this irrational impulse. But capitalism is identical with the pursuit of profit, and forever renewed profit, by means of continuous, rational, capitalistic enterprise.

  Max Weber

  Mean, Forever, May

  Max Weber (2012). “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”, p.17, Courier Corporation

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• Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Peace, Men, Ubuntu

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• Capitalism justified itself and was adopted as an economic principle on the express ground that it provides selfish motives for doing good, and that human beings will do nothing except for selfish motives

  George Bernard Shaw

  Selfish, Principles, Justified

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• The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm, capitalism is that kind of a system.

  Milton Friedman

  Philosophy, Organization, Greed

  Milton Friedman (1968). “Bright Promises, Dismal Performance: An Economist's Protest”, San Diego : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

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• The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.

  Susan Sontag

  Liberty, Expansion, Possibility

  Susan Sontag (2013). “Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors”, p.118, Penguin UK

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• If democracy is justified in governing the state,then it must also be justified in governing economic enterprises, and to say that it is not justified in governing economic enterprises is to imply that it is not justified in governing the state.

  Robert A. Dahl

  Democracy, Justified, Economic

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• From the viewpoint of economic democracy, the capitalism-socialism debate was a debate between private and state capitalism (i.e., the private or public employment system), and the debate was as misframed as would be a debate between the private or public ownership of slaves.

  David P. Ellerman

  Democracy, Would Be, Employment

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• Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power.

  Milton Friedman

  Mind, Plant, Concentration

  Milton Friedman (2009). “Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition”, p.2, University of Chicago Press

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• The Romanticists predominantly, were enemies of capitalism, which they regarded as a prosaic, materialistic, “petty bourgeois” system — never realizing that it was the only system that could make freedom, individuality and the pursuit of values possible in practice.

  Ayn Rand

  Practice, Individuality, Laissez Faire Capitalism

  "Ayn Rand Reader".

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• Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices. It is this superlatively moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventative law, snooping bureaucrats, and the chronic goad of fear.

  Alan Greenspan

  Integrity, Self Esteem, Mean

  "Word for Word/'Greenspan Shrugged'; When Greed Was a Virtue And Regulation the Enemy" by Bill Goldstein, www.nytimes.com. July 21, 2002.

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• The paradigm of competition is a race: by rewarding the winner, we encourage everyone to run faster. When capitalism really works this way, it does a good job; but its defenders are wrong in assuming it always works this way.

  Richard Stallman

  Running, Jobs, Race

  Richard Stallman (2002). “Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman”, p.32, Lulu.com

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• With the exception of capitalism, there is nothing so revolting as revolution.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Revolution, Exception

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• The capitalist engine is first and last an engine of mass production which unavoidably also means production for the masses. . . . It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factory girls.

  Joseph A. Schumpeter

  Girl, Queens, Mean

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• Socialism is nothing more nor less than the social, political and ideological system which breaks the fetters upon economic growth created under capitalism and opens the way to a new period of economic and social expansion on a much larger scale.

  Earl Browder

  Political, Growth, Way

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• Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force. But even Capitalist cynicism will admit that however unconscionable we may be when our own interests are affected, we can be most indignantly virtuous at the expense of others.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Self, May, Belief

  "The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism". Book by George Bernard Shaw, p. 214, 1928.

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• The struggle between the opponents and defenders of capitalism is a struggle between innovators who do not know what innovation to make and conservatives who do not know what to conserve.

  Simone Weil

  Struggle, Innovation, Opponents

  Simone Weil (2015). “Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings”, p.166, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• Capitalism designates an economic system significantly characterized by the predominance of "capital." Capitalism and double entry bookkeeping are absolutely indissociable; their relationship to each other is that of form to content.

  Werner Sombart

  Economic, Form, Bookkeeping

  "Der moderne Kapitalismus". Book by Werner Sombart, 2006.

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• High interest rates focus on the revenue of a parasitic class.

  Linda McQuaig

  Class, Focus, Finance

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• A lost job can put a smile on any shareholder's face.

  Eric Reguly

  Jobs, Faces, Lost

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• Big business is basic to the very life of this country; and yet many -perhaps most - Americans have a deep-seated fear and an emotional repugnance to it. Here is monumental contradiction.

  David Lilienthal

  Country, Emotional, Contradiction

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• There is no western, capitalistic country in which the conditions of the masses have not improved in an unprecedented way.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Country, Way, Mass

  Ludwig Von Mises (2006). “Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow”, p.13, Ludwig von Mises Institute

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