Quotes from Robert B. Reich

A smaller government reflecting the needs of the middle class and poor is superior to a big government reflecting the needs of the privileged and powerful.

It turns out that what money buys has rapidly diminishing emotional returns ... As long as we're not destitute, happiness depends less on getting what we want than appreciating what we already have.

So many Americans are angry and frustrated these days—vulnerable to loss of job and health care and home, without a shred of economic security—they're easy prey for demagogues offering big lies. Yet the only antidote for big lies is big truth—told relentlessly and powerfully. You must be armed with it.

Keynes declared capitalism the best system ever devised to achieve a civilized economic society. But he recognized in it two major faults—"its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.

Socialism is the epithet they have hurled at every advance the people have made," President Harry Truman observed. It was "what they called public power…

no one should confuse income for virtue, net worth for worthiness. The underlying reality is that capitalism is not working as it should or as it can.

Americans who are angry and suspicious of one another will fight over the crumbs rather than join together against those who have run off with most of the pie.

Don't assume that we're locked in a battle between capitalism and socialism. We already have socialism—for the very rich. Most Americans are subject to harsh capitalism.

We are born, we grow up, we live our lives as best we can. If we are thoughtful we are good parents and good partners. If we are wise we strive for integrity and intimacy. If we are fortunate we discover love and joy. If we are able, we make the world a little better than we found it. That is all there is for any of us.

Don't believe the system is a meritocracy in which ability and hard work are necessarily rewarded. Today the most important predictor of someone's future income and wealth is the income and wealth of the family they're born into.

the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object.

What we have lost, I think, is a sense of our connectedness to each other and to our ideals—the America that John F. Kennedy asked that we contribute to.

At the same time, most of what government does that helps them is now so deeply woven into the thread of daily life that it's no longer recognizable as government.

Fewer and fewer large and medium-sized companies offer their workers full health-care coverage—74 percent did in 1980, under 10 percent do today. As a result, health insurance premiums, co-payments, and deductibles are soaring.

The invisible hand of the marketplace is connected to a wealthy and muscular arm.

In all, 62 percent of the budget cuts would come from low-income programs. Yet at the same time, the Republican budget would provide a substantial tax cut to the rich—who are already taking home an almost unprecedented share of the nation's total income.

We "bowl alone," as sociologist Robert Putnam has put it. Yet this fails to account for a monumental shift in whom we join and for what. We still join together, but now we join for services too expensive to purchase alone—child care, the schools our children attend, recreational facilities, and security...

people who believe the game is rigged are easy prey for political demagogues with fast tongues and dumb ideas.

The problem is not the size of government but whom the government is for.

Power is the ability to direct or influence the behavior of others. On a large scale, power is the capacity to set the public agenda—to frame big choices, to influence legislators, and to get laws enacted or prevent them from being enacted, to assert one's will on the world.

As the economic historian Karl Polanyi recognized, those who argue for "less government" are really arguing for a different government—often one that favors them or their patrons.1

With declining state and local spending, total public spending on education, infrastructure, and basic research has dropped from 12 percent of GDP in the 1970s to less than 3 percent in 2011.

Forget what you may have learned about the choice between the "free market" and government. A market cannot exist without a government to organize and enforce it. The important question is whom the market has been organized to serve.

The question will arise, and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine, 'Which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations—educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?'