“Surprising as it may seem today, classical ideas of creating a free market were to be achieved by “socialist” reforms. Their common aim was to protect populations from having to pay prices that included a non-labor rent or financial tax to pay landlords and natural resource owners, monopolists and bondholders. The vested interests railed against public regulation and taxation along these lines. They opposed public ownership or even the taxation of land, natural monopolies and banking. They wanted to collect rent and interest, not make land, banking and infrastructure monopolies public in character.”
Source: J Is for Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception
“Passion empowers us to accomplish what we were created to do.”
Source: Paradigm Shift: Change Your Mindset and Live the Life of Your Dreams
“When the volume of debt has grown as large as national income or GDP, and when it bears an interest rate (typically 5%) above the economy’s rate of growth (typically just 1% to 2%), then all the growth in national income is taken by the creditors.”
Source: J Is for Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception
“In fact, they are not taught in any university departments: the dynamics of debt, and how the pattern of bank lending inflates land prices, or national income accounting and the rising share absorbed by rent extraction in the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector. There was only one way to learn how to analyze these topics: to work for banks. Back in the 1960s there was barely a hint that these trends would become a great financial bubble.”
Source: Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy
“Popular morality blames victims for going into debt – not only individuals, but also national governments. The trick in this ideological war is to convince debtors to imagine that general prosperity depends on paying bankers and making bondholders rich – a veritable Stockholm Syndrome in which debtors identify with their financial captors.”
Source: Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy
“And yet it bewildered him that people truly believed capitalism to be about making things or providing services at a profit. He found it extraordinary how most people disliked speculators but thought of them as peripheral, as harmless bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. They fail to recognize the very opposite is true, […] that enterprise long ago became a bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. That, in reality, workers, inventors and managers resemble driftwood buffeted hither and thither on a manic torrent of runaway finance.”
Source: Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present
“Debt is just as dangerous in business as it is in personal finance. Entrepreneurs need to be careful not to cripple the businesses they lead with debt. Because one thing debt does well is cripple it's host.”
“Home life ceases to be free and beautiful as soon as it is founded on borrowing and debt. (A Doll's House, act 1)”
Source: Plays 1: A Doll's House/Emperor and Galilean/John Gabriel Borkman/When We Dead Awaken
“A false alarm is sounded that government budget deficits will increase consumer prices — with no discussion of how private-sector credit deflates economies. The problem is that credit is debt — and paying debt service to bankers and bondholders (and various grades of loan sharks) leaves less income available to spend on goods and services. So debt deflation is today’s major problem, not inflation.”
Source: The Bubble and Beyond
“In 1995 Bank of America issued a famous report on sprawl in California. The bank pronounced: 'Urban job centers have decentralized to the suburbs. New housing tracts have moved even deeper into agriculturally and environmentally sensitive areas. Private auto use continues to rise. This acceleration of sprawl has surfaced enormous social, environmental, and economic costs, which until now have been hidden, ignored, or quietly borne by society.”
Source: Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000