Capitalism Quotes

The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.

~ Michael Parenti

Any human being should be capable of three things to earn such title: live alone, hunt and drive anything with or without wheels. If you don't have these three things, you're either a slave or an animal. Any idea about being social or human has been cleverly associated with these two things, in order to make believe that being a social animal is the ideal to aspire for, especially if such animal is enslaved by a certain amount of ideals promoted by the system that gives him life and cuts it off as soon as he shows himself undeserving.

~ Robin Sacredfire

In my opinion, the sun was made to light worthier toil than this.

~ Henry David Thoreau

But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Because life is robust,Because life is bigger than equations, stronger than money, stronger than guns and poison and bad zoning policy, stronger than capitalism,Because Mother Nature bats last, and Mother Ocean is strong, and we live inside our mothers forever, and Life is tenacious and you can never kill it, you can never buy it,So Life is going to dive down into your dark pools, Life is going to explode the enclosures and bring back the commons,O you dark pools of money and law and quantitudinal stupidity, you oversimple algorithms of greed, you desperate simpletons hoping for a story you can understand,Hoping for safety, hoping for cessation of uncertainty, hoping for ownership of volatility, O you poor fearful jerks,Life! Life! Life! Life is going to kick your ass.

~ Kim Stanley Robinson

Colonialism is the mother of terrorism.

~ Suzy Kassem

Rhetorical bombast, music and song resound, banners wave, flowers and colors serve as symbols, and the leaders seek to attach their followers to their own person. Liberalism has nothing to do with all this. It has no party flower and no party color, no party song and no party idols, no symbols and no slogans. It has the substance and the arguments. These must lead it to victory.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

Somebody said to me, 'But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.' That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, 'Now, let's write a swimming pool.

~ Paul Mccartney

The rock and roll business is pretty absurd, but the world of serious music is much worse.

~ Frank Zappa

The hand that gives is among the hand that takes. Money has no fatherland, financiers are without patriotism and without decency, their sole object is gain.

~ Napoléon Bonaparte

This planet was a marketplace where evil tugged murderously at its chains. Its spies were everywhere. At windy corners where young girls with knowing children’s faces were selling flowers and matches, on the operating tables at the hospitals, in the slums, at railway stations, under viaducts.

~ Paul Leppin

It is everyone's bounden duty to try to get more than they have got already. If you have got two shillin' you try to make it into four shillin' . . . there is no end to it.

~ Barry Unsworth

Capitalism has a way of letting people view the world through rose-coloured glasses.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

That’s the thing,” she said. “You add on getting rid of starvation and poverty like it’s a fringe benefit. Like the slice of lemon you get with a plate of whitebait.” He laughed. “That’s why I succeed,” he said, “where the men with beautiful souls always fail. If you walk through the market asking the stallholders to give you a slice of lemon for free, they’d laugh in your face. Pay for the whitebait and you get a good meal of whitebait for your money, plus the free lemon.

~ K.j. Parker

g*d wept, but that mattered little to an unbelieving age ... for there began to rise in America in 1876 a new capitalism & a new enslavement of labor --w.e.b. dubois

~ Debois

Income from labor [in the United States] is about as unequally distributed as has ever been observed anywhere.

~ Thomas Piketty

Money is the alienated essence of man's labor and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it.

~ Karl Marx

Any system that values profit over human life is a very dangerous one indeed.

~ Suzy Kassem

Philosopher Jean Baudrillard made a similar observation about the use of material goods as symbols of immaterial values. He noted that any given material object has two kinds of value: it has use value (the amount of utility which can be derived from the good), and it has sign value (a value based on what the object means to the person who owns it.) Advertisers constantly attempt to increase the amount that people will pay for products by infusing them with artificial sign value. Emotional branding, for example, is the practice of using images to link a product with a positive emotional state, so that people will unthinkingly purchase the product when they crave the emotion.

~ Melinda Selmys

Policymakers cannot take the situation lightly, for at its worst, it speaks to “intergenerational inequity” – a breaking of the social contract between two generations.

~ Usman W. Chohan

Actions that exemplify the limitations of a singular devotion to the profit motive, also draw a troublesome distinction between what is legal and what is moral.

~ Usman W. Chohan

Happiness in a family really revolves around how much money I have in my disposal.

~ Vann Chow

Money’ll always end up bad. Man’s greed and man’s killer instinct go hand-in-hand. Watch a barracuda attack something shiny and you’ll see what our fascination with gold is. Think about it. We give actually valuable things like food and shelter for stones. We kill for it. Make no mistake, behind every man who seeks his fortune is a predator.

~ James Schannep

An attempt is sometimes made to demonstrate the desirability of measures directed against speculation by reference to the fact that there are times when there is nobody in opposition to the bears in the foreign-exchange market so that they alone are able to determine the rate of exchange. That, of course, is not correct. Yet it must be noticed that speculation has a peculiar effect in the case of a currency whose progressive depreciation is to be expected while it is impossible to foresee when the depreciation will stop, if at all. While, in general, speculation reduces the gap between the highest and lowest prices without altering the average price-level, here, where the movement will presumably continue in the same direction, this naturally can not be the case. The effect of speculation here is to permit the fluctuation, which would otherwise proceed more uniformly, to proceed by fits and starts with the interposition of pauses.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

Any intervention, such as that of the German Reichsbank in the Spring of 1923, in which only a small part of the increasing note-expansion was recovered by the banks through the sale of foreign bills, would necessarily be unsuccessful. Led by the idea of opposing speculation, inflationistic governments have allowed themselves to become involved in measures whose meaning is hardly intelligible. Thus at one time the importation of notes, then their exportation, then again both their exportation and importation, have been prohibited. Exporters have been forbidden to sell for their own country's notes, importers to buy with them.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

It is not easy to determine whether there are any who still adhere in good faith to the doctrine that traces back the depreciation of money to the activity of speculators. The doctrine is an indispensable instrument of the lowest form of demagogy, it is the resource of governments in search of a scapegoat. There are scarcely any independent writers nowadays who defend it, those who support it are paid to do so.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

But there are nevertheless three conclusions that seem to follow from our critical examination of the possibilities of inflationary policy. In the first place, all the aims of inflationism can be secured by other sorts of intervention in economic affairs, and secured better, and without undesirable incidental effects. If it is desired to relieve debtors, moratoria may be declared or the obligation to repay loans may be removed altogether; if it is desired to encourage exportation, export premiums may be granted; if it is desired to render importation more difficult, simple prohibition may be resorted to, or import duties levied. All these measures permit discrimination between classes of people, branches of production, and districts, and this is impossible for an inflationary policy. Inflation benefits all debtors, including the rich, and injures all creditors, including the poor; adjustment of the burden of debts by special legislation allows of differentiation. Inflation encourages the exportation of all commodities and hinders all importation; premiums, duties, and prohibitions can be employed discriminatorily.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

That policy which aims at raising the objective exchange-value of money is called, after the most important means at its disposal, restrictionism or deflationism. This nomenclature does not really embrace all the policies that aim at an increase in the value of money. The aim of restrictionism may also be attained by not increasing the quantity of money when the demand for it increases, or by not increasing it enough. This method has quite often been adopted as a way of increasing the value of money in face of the problems of a depreciated credit-money standard.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

Restrictionism, however, demands positive sacrifices from the national exchequer when it is carried out by the withdrawal of notes from circulation (say through the issue of interest-bearing bonds or through taxation) and their cancellation.The unpopularity of restrictionism has other causes as well. Attempts to raise the objective exchange-value of money, in the circumstances that have existed, have necessarily been limited either to single States or to a few States and at the best have had only a very small prospect of simultaneous realization throughout the whole world. Now as soon as a single country or a few countries go over to a money with a rising purchasing power, while the other countries retain a money with a falling or stationary exchange-value, or one which although it may be rising in value is not rising to the same extent, then, as has been demonstrated above, the conditions of international trade are modified. In the country whose money is rising in value, exportation becomes more difficult and importation easier.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

Restrictionistic ideas have never met with any measure of popular sympathy except after a time of monetary depreciation when it has been necessary to decide what should take the place of the abandoned inflationary policy.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

A metallic money, the augmentation or diminution of the quantity of metal available for which is independent of deliberate human intervention, is becoming the modern monetary ideal. The significance of adherence to a metallic-money system lies in the freedom of the value of money from State influence that such a system guarantees.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

The State does not govern the market; in the market in which products are exchanged it may quite possibly be a powerful party, but nevertheless it is only one party of many, nothing more than that. All its attempts to transform the exchange-ratios between economic goods that are determined in the market can only be undertaken with the instruments of the market.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

Etatism, as a theory, is the doctrine of the omnipotence of the State, and, as a policy, the attempt to regulate all mundane affairs by authoritative commandment and prohibition. The ideal society of etatism is a particular sort of socialistic community; it is usual in discussions involving this ideal society to speak of State Socialism, or, in some connexions, of Christian Socialism.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

Etatism by no means aims at the formal transformation of all ownership of the means of production into State ownership by a complete overthrow of the established legal system. Only the biggest industrial, mining, and transport enterprises are to be nationalized; in agriculture, and in medium- and small-scale industry, private property is nominally to continue. Nevertheless, all enterprises are to become State undertakings in fact. Owners are to be left the title and dignity of ownership, it is true, and to be given a right to the receipt of a 'reasonable' income, 'in accordance with their position'; but, in fact, every business is to be changed into a government office and every livelihood into an official profession.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

There is no room at all for independent enterprise under any variety of State Socialism. Prices are to be regulated authoritatively; authority is to fix what is to be produced, and how, and in what quantities. There is to be no speculation, no 'excessive' profit, no loss. There is to be no innovation unless it be decreed by authority. The official is to direct and supervise everything.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

Every word of etatistic thought is contradicted by the doctrines of sociology and economics; this is why etatists endeavour to prove that these sciences do not exist. In their opinion, social affairs are shaped by the State. To the law, all things are possible; and there is no sphere in which State intervention is not omnipotent.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

That the social life of human beings is subject to definite limitations; that it is governed by a set of laws that are comparable with those of Nature; these are notions that are unknown to the etatist. For the etatist, everything is a question of Macht - power, force, might. And his conception of Macht is crudely materialistic.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

History likewise shows that sometimes the 'monetary standard of the victors' can prove to be very bad. There have seldom been more brilliant victories than those eventually achieved by the American insurgents under Washington against the English troops. But the American 'continental dollar did not benefit from them. The more proudly the star-spangled banner rose on high, the lower did the exchange-rate fall, until, at the very moment when the victory of the rebels was secured, the dollar became entirely valueless. The course of events was no different not long afterwards in France. In spite of the victories of the revolutionary army, the metal premium rose.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

For the etatist, money is a creature of the State, and the esteem in which money is held is the economic expression of the respect or prestige enjoyed by the State. The more powerful and the richer the State, the better its money. Thus, during the War, it was asserted that 'the monetary standard of the victors' would ultimately be the best money. Yet victory and defeat on the battlefield can exercise only an indirect influence on the value of money.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

Neither has the wealth of a country any bearing on the valuation of its money. Nothing is more erroneous than the widespread habit of regarding the monetary standard as something in the nature of the shares of the State or the community.Such observers fail to recognize that the valuation of the rnonetary unit does not depend upon the wealth of the country, but upon the ratio between the quantity of money and the demand for it, so that even the richest country may have a bad currency and the poorest country a good one.

~ Ludwig Von Mises