"Because of this year’s payroll tax increase, millions of American workers have had to tighten their belts by precisely 2 percent. They found a way. Washington, spending $3.8 trillion, cannot? If so, we might as well declare bankruptcy now and save the attorneys’ fees."
- Charles Krauthammer
0
"Goldman Sachs’ commodities index is the most heavily traded in the world. The financial firm hoards futures of rice, wheat, corn, sugar, and livestock and jacks up commodity prices by as much as two hundred percent on the global market so that poor families can no longer afford basic staples and literally starve. Hundreds of millions of poor in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America do not have enough to eat in order to feed this mania for profit. The technical jargon, learned in business schools and on trading floors, effectively masks the reality of what is happening: murder. The cold, neutral words of business and commerce are designed to make systems operate, even systems of death, with ruthless efficiency."
- Chris Hedges, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt
2
"The belief that human beings and human societies should be ruled by the demands of the marketplace is utopian folly. There is nothing in human history or human nature that supports the idea that sacrificing everything before the free market leads to a social good."
- Chris Hedges, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt
8
"An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics."
- Plutarch
0
"It’s one of the mordant ironies of contemporary history that Europe fought two of the world’s most savage wars in the first half of the twentieth century to deny Germany a European empire, then spent the second half of the same century allowing Germany to attain peacefully nearly every one of its war aims short of overseas colonies and a victory parade down the Champs Élysées."
- John Michael Greer
0
"The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system."
- Arthur C. Clarke
1
"Whenever the tension that is always provoked by economic conditions reached a certain climax in ancient Rome, it repeatedly happened that a section of the population marched out onto the Mons sacer, the Aventine or the Janiculum, and threatened to found a second Rome under the very noses of the mother city and the venerable city fathers unless its wishes were granted. That was called Secessio plebis."
- Max Burckhard
0
"In 1931 Stalin translated “Control over the means of production” to mean the increase of productivity by new methods used to control the producer. In the midst of the U.S. Depression he launched Russia on an industrial race. Since then a socialist policy has been considered one which serves the industrially organized productivity of a socialist country. Stalin’s reinterpretation of Marxism has since then served as a form of blackmail against socialists and the left."
- Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality
1
"Like the modern school system, hospital-based healthcare fits the principle that those who have will receive even more, and those who have not will be taken for the little that they have."
- Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality
1
"Maybe it’s making lemonades out of lemons, but younger generations of Americans are much less interested in owning cars, have much lower rates of holding drivers’ licenses, are much more interested in European-style cafe neighborhoods, smaller dwellings, being in public more of the time, being outdoors, and all the rest. People in their late teens are more interested in their iPhones than they are in their drivers’ licenses. This is a kind of dematerialization that’s going on in the economy. Some of that is because opportunities are few, but some of it is a reflection of a spreading realization that this stuff does not provide the quality of life we thought it would."
- Alan Durning
80
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economics
