Quotes About Capitalism

In all those cases, in accordance with the theme of this book, increases in economic freedom have gone hand in hand with increases in political and civil freedom and have led to increased prosperity; competitive capitalism and freedom have been inseparable.

After the fall of communism, everybody in the world agreed that socialism was a failure. Everybody in the world, more or less, agreed that capitalism was a success. And every capitalist country in the world apparently deduced from that what the West needed was more socialism.

At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really lack of belief in freedom itself.

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.

Wherever you had Freedom, you had Capitalism.

a private enterprise is a failure, it closes down—unless it can get a government subsidy to keep it going; if a government enterprise fails, it is expanded. I challenge you to find exceptions. The

The West developed the notion of the "corporate body," the senate or representative assembly; Islam did not. The West, in a secularization of the Catholic corpus mysticum, eventually developed the idea of the corporation that lies at the heart of capitalism; Islam did not. Western science has the notions of the fact-value distinction, genuine critical analysis, and provisional truth; Islam keeps reason subordinate to faith.

Junk is the "ideal product" because the "junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.

This points to a nagging and important question about free-market ideologues: Are they 'true believers', driven by ideology and faith that free markets will cure underdevelopment, as is often asserted, or do the ideas and theories frequently serve as an elaborate rationale to allow people to act on unfettered greed while still invoking an altruistic motive?

It (the Chinese move to embrace capitalism in 1989) is a mirror of the corporatist state first pioneered in Chile under Pinochet: a revolving door between corporate and political elites who combine their power to eliminate workers as an organized political force. The creation of today's market society was not the result of a sequence of spontaneous events but rather of state interference and violence.

From Chile to China to Iraq, torture has been a silent partner in the global free-market crusade.

climate change as a battle between capitalism and the planet

right now capitalism is winning hands down. It wins every time the need for economic growth is used as the excuse for putting off climate action yet again, or for breaking emission reduction commitments already made.

Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.

Our economy takes endlessly from workers, asking more and more from them in ever-tighter time frames, even as employers offer less and less security and lower wages in return.

The slogan for contemporary capitalism--fear and disorder are the catalysts for each new leap forward

In other words, changing the earth's climate in ways that will be chaotic and disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of changing the fundamental, growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism.

our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life.

So my mind keeps coming back to the question: what is wrong with us? What is really preventing us from putting out the fire that is threatening to burn down our collective house? I think the answer is far more simple than many have led us to believe: we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis.

destabilized climate is the cost of deregulated, global capitalism, its unintended, yet unavoidable consequence.39

It is a painful irony that while the right is forever casting climate change as a left-wing plot, most leftists and liberals are still averting their eyes, having yet to grasp that climate science has handed them the most powerful argument against unfettered capitalism since William Blake's "dark Satanic Mills" blackened England's skies (which, incidentally, was the beginning of climate change).

The Apprentice delivered the central sales pitch of free-market theory, telling viewers that by unleashing your most selfish and ruthless side, you are actually a hero—creating jobs and fueling growth. Don't be nice, be a killer.

A destabilized climate is the cost of deregulated, global capitalism, its unintended, yet unavoidable consequence.39

It's impossible to say how much the decision to use the tsunami as an opportunity for disaster capitalism contributed to the return to civil war.