Quotes About Capitalism

What we have been living for three decades is frontier capitalism, with the frontier constantly shifting location from crisis to crisis, moving on as soon as the law catches up.

During the Cold War, widespread alcoholism was always seen in the West as evidence that life under Communism was so dismal that Russians needed large quantities of vodka to get through the day. Under capitalism, however, Russians drinks more than twice as much alcohol as they used to - and they are reaching for harder painkillers as well.

These men, committed as they were to freedom—liberty as they understood it, and viewing themselves as the guardians of it—were therefore also committed capitalists. But their scientific colleagues were increasingly finding evidence that capitalism was failing in a crucial respect: it was failing to protect the natural environment upon which all life—free or not—ultimately depends.

The doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest,"36 Soros wrote. Like its bête noire, Marxism, laissez-faire economics claimed to be scientific, based upon immutable laws of nature, and also like Marxism, it has not stood the test of experience. If it were a scientific theory, it would have long ago been rejected.

The billionaire investor George Soros has coined a term to describe this perspective: "free market fundamentalism." It is the belief not simply that free markets are the best way to run an economic system, but that free markets are the only way that will not ultimately destroy our other freedoms. "The doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest,"36 Soros wrote.

A 1994 FOREST report entitled "Through the Smokescreen of Science: The Dangers of Politically Corrupted Science for Democratic Public Policy" claimed much the same thing as Fred Singer had: that science was being rigged to advance a political agenda. Whether or not that was true, this report made clear that the inverse was certainly true: science was being attacked to advance their agenda, the defense of free market capitalism.

Nicholas Stern, formerly chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank from 2000 to 2003, and principal author of the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change (commissioned by U.K. prime minister Gordon Brown), has called climate change "the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen."55 No wonder the defenders of free market capitalism are worried.

their scientific colleagues were increasingly finding evidence that capitalism was failing in a crucial respect: it was failing to protect the natural environment upon which all life—free or not—ultimately depends.

The "real" agenda of environmentalists—and the scientists who provided the data on which they relied—was to destroy capitalism and replace it with some sort of worldwide utopian Socialism—or perhaps Communism. That echoed a common right-wing refrain in the early 1990s: that environmental regulation was the slippery slope to Socialism. In 1992, columnist George Will encapsulated this view, saying that environmentalism was a "green tree with red roots.

Accepting that by-products of industrial civilization were irreparably damaging the global environment was to accept the reality of market failure. It was to acknowledge the limits of free market capitalism.

As Nobel laureate Milton Friedman wrote in 1962, "Freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself…. Economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom."2

The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument.

United States, along with Canada and the United Kingdom, has become a "plutonomy" where "economic growth is powered by, and largely consumed by, the wealthy few." Economists

Capitalism, it turns out, can achieve what charity and good intentions sometimes cannot. Microfinance has done more to bolster the status of women, and to protect them from abuse, than any laws could accomplish.

The problem is that capitalists typically don't know how to divide the pie well and socialists typically don't know how to grow it well.

If government subsidies to corporations were a sufficient criterion to label a country's economic system as "state capitalist," many market economies would qualify.

Vladimir Putin's Russia is typical of dictatorships old and new. It does not try to censor everything. The regime understands that the total control of communism failed because it suppressed too much. On a personal level, the men at the top in the Kremlin do not want to go back to a time when the bribes they received were worth little because the luxuries of capitalism were on the other side of an iron curtain.

fundamental flaw of modern capitalism is that businesses promote bombastic people. As Cameron Anderson and Sébastien Brion of the University of California, Berkeley, showed experimentally, 'In conditions where there is any ambiguity in competence and performance (which is common in organisations), overconfident individuals will be perceived as more competent by others, and attain higher levels of status, compared to individuals with more accurate self-perceptions of competence.

Shallow uniformity is not an accident but a consequence of what Marxists optimistically call late capitalism.

Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.

After all, the ideal of bourgeois politics is the absence of politics, since capital is nothing other than the consistent displacement of social decision-making into the marketplace

The Gospels and the Communist Manifesto are on the wane; the world's future lies in the power of Coca-Cola and pornography.

The facility with which industrial capitalism constructs and destroys—obeying clear precepts of profitability—transforms the average man into an intellectual, moral, and physical nomad. Whatever is permanent today is an obstacle.

If one only aspires to provide a growing number of persons with a growing number of goods, without worrying about the quality of the persons, or of the goods, then capitalism is the perfect solution.