Quotes About Capitalism

When there is a surplus of money chasing assets such as homes, stocks, or bonds, prices rise and interest rates fall. Eventually prices reach irrational levels, and then they collapse. Money becomes scarce, and inefficient businesses are forced to shut down. Efficient businesses survive, and the cycle starts again. This has been repeated over and over since modern capitalism arose.

If the government controls, guarantees, channels, or directs investment, it is not capitalism. Pivotal to the investment process is interest rates. For entrepreneurs to control capital, interest rates must reflect its real cost rather than merely the cost of printing money. Otherwise the money printers will dominate investment.

The key issue in economics is not aligning incentives with some putative public good but aligning knowledge with power. Business investments have both a financial and an epistemic yield. Capitalism catalytically joins the two. Capitalist economies grow because they award wealth to its creators, who have already proved that they can increase it. Their tests yield knowledge because they are falsifiable; they can be exposed as wrong. Businesses are subject to failure.

The system failed not because it was rational, but because rational choice in the face of massive ignorance—whether attributable to folly or deceit—is meaningless. Capitalism depends not on the freedom to choose but on the free flow of information across a low-entropy carrier. Corrupt the carrier with noise, and capitalism collapses. And the great corrupter of any carrier, the great generator of destructive noise, is power. And in this case the powers assembled were immense.

The risk-bearing role of the rich cannot be performed so well by anyone else. The benefits of capitalism still depend on capitalists. The other groups on the pyramid of wealth should occasionally turn from the spectacles of consumption long enough to see the adventure on the frontiers of the economy above them - an adventure not without its note of nobility...

La Roumanie est en guerre avec le capitalisme, intervint CeauÈ™escu. (Il bégaie toujours légèrement lorsqu'il aborde un sujet important ou lorsqu'il est en colère.) N-nous ne p-pouvons pas vaincre avec les m-machines à l-laver. C-ce sont des d-dollars qui n-nous faut pour p-protéger la l-liberté de n-notre peuple. Et n-nous gagnerons plus de d-dollars en vendant des armes que des appareils m-ménagers. (p. 40)

Ah remember walkin along Princes Street wi Spud, we both hate walkin along that hideous street, deadened by tourists and shoppers, the twin curse ay modern capitalism.

No me conviene salir de un capitalista para caer en otro. Lo que hay que hacer es una cooperativa y mandar a la madame al carajo. No ha oído hablar de eso? Váyase con cuidado, mire que si sus inquilinos le forman una cooperativa en el campo, usted se jodió. Lo que yo quiero es una cooperativa de putas. Pueden ser putas y maricones, para darle más amplitud al negocio. Nosotros ponemos todo, el capital y el trabajo. Para qué queremos un patrón?

We spent a good part of the twentieth century trying out various forms of revolution, from Marxism to savage capitalism, ranging through each and every intermediate shading. Our hope that a change in government can improve our luck is like hoping to win the lottery: totally without rational foundation.

It means zero to be against greed.

If you allow for a purely capitalistic society, without any type of regulation at all, you will get one monopoly that will eat all of the smaller fish and own everything, and then you'll have zero capitalism, zero competition - it would just be one giant company.

Life is now a war zone, and as such, the number of people considered disposable has grown exponentially, and this includes low income whites, poor minorities, immigrants, the unemployed, the homeless, and a range of people who are viewed as a liability to capital and its endless predatory quest for power and profits.

As the scale of economic activity increases until capitalism affects everything, from the atmosphere to the deep ocean floor, the entire planet becomes a sacrifice zone: we all inhabit the periphery of the profit-making machine.

America... an economic system prouder of the distribution of its products than of the products themselves.

Commerce is greedy. Ideology is blood-thirsty.

The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.

The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

What kind of society isn't structured on greed? 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.

Capitalism in the United States has undergone profound modification, not just under the New Deal but through a consensus that continued to grow after the New Deal. Government in the U.S. today is a senior partner in every business in the country.

By pursuing his own interest (the individual) frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.

We are indeed a nation of shopkeepers.

Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.

We are turning all Bolivians into capitalists.

The artist is seen like a producer of commodities, like a factory that turns our refrigerators.