Quotes from Robert B. Reich

Angry voters are more willing to support candidates who vilify their opponents and find easy scapegoats. Talking heads have become shouting heads. Many Americans have grown cynical about our collective ability to solve our problems. And that cynicism has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as nothing gets solved.

It's no mere coincidence that over the last century the top earners' share of the nation's total income peaked in 1928 and 2007—the two years just preceding the biggest downturns.

Indentured servitude is banned, but what about students seeking to sell shares of their future earnings in exchange for money up front to pay for their college tuitions?

Yet the notion that you're paid what you're "worth" is by now so deeply ingrained in the public consciousness that many who earn very little assume it's their own fault.

The tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003—and extended for two years in 2010—in 2011 saved the richest 1.4 million taxpayers (the top 1 percent) more money than the rest of America's 140.89 million taxpayers received in total income.

we still haven't learned the essential lesson of the two big economic crashes of the last seventy-five years: when the economy becomes too lopsided—disproportionately benefiting corporate owners and top executives vis-à-vis average workers—it tips over.

For three decades almost all the gains from economic growth have gone to the top. In the 1960s and 1970s, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans got 9–10 percent of our total income. By 2007, just before the Great Recession, that share had more than doubled, to 23.5 percent. Over the same period the wealthiest one-tenth of 1 percent tripled its share. We haven't experienced this degree of concentrated wealth since the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.

It is no great feat for an economy to create a large number of very-low-wage jobs. Slavery, after all, was a full employment system.

Government doesn't "intrude" on the "free market." It creates the market. The rules are neither neutral nor universal, and they are not permanent. Different societies at different times have adopted different versions. The rules partly mirror a society's evolving norms and values but also reflect who in society has the most power to make or influence them.

There can be no "free market" without government. The "free market" does not exist in the wilds beyond the reach of civilization. Competition in the wild is a contest for survival in which the largest and strongest typically win. Civilization, by contrast, is defined by rules; rules create markets, and governments generate the rules.

The problem is that the choice we make in the market don't fully reflect our values as citizens. We might make different choices if we understood the social consequences of our purchases or investments and if we knew all other consumers and investors would join us in forbearing from certain great deals whose social consequence were abhorrent to us.

Few ideas have more profoundly poisoned the minds of more people than the notion of a "free market" existing somewhere in the universe, into which government "intrudes.

A market—any market—requires that government make and enforce the rules of the game. In most modern democracies, such rules emanate from legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts. Government doesn't "intrude" on the "free market." It creates the market.

The concentration of wealth in America has created an education system in which the super-rich can buy admission to college for their children, a political system in which they can buy Congress and the presidency, a health-care system in which they can buy care that others can't, and a justice system in which they can buy their way out of jail.