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Capitalism Quotes

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Capitalism Quotes

“Capitalism is the only system that can make freedom, individuality, and the pursuit of values possible in practice. When I say 'capitalism,' I mean a pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism - with a separation of economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as a separation of state and church.”

“What distinguishes the historical social system we are calling historical capitalism is that in this historical system capital came to be used (invested) in a very special way. It came to be used with the primary objective or intent of self-expansion. In this system, past accumulations were 'capital' only to the extend they were used to accumulate more of the same.”

“To be sure, the use of force by one party in a market transaction in order to improve his price was no invention of capitalism. Unequal exchange is an ancient practice. What was remarkable about capitalism as a historical system was the way in which this unequal exchange could be hidden; indeed, hidden so well that it is only after five hundred years of the operation of this mechanism that even the avowed opponents of the system have begun to unveil it systematically.”

“The way in which these two practices contain each other is that it has always been possible to use the one against the other: to use racism-sexism to prevent universalism from moving too far in the direction of egalitarianism; to use universalism to prevent racism-sexism from moving too far in the direction of a caste system that would inhibit the work force mobility so necessary for the capitalist accumulation process.”

“One by one, these governments came undone, and were forced into IMF tutelage (and national illegitimacy) by the careening oil prices, the debt imbroglio, and falling terms of trade. The last of these governments to fall were the Communist regimes of eastern Europe, which have now gone the way of other Third World countries. The second in the cascade of bifurcations is thus symbolized by 1989.”

“The moral justification of capitalism does not lie in the altruist claim that it represents the best way to achieve 'the common good.' It is true that capitalism does -- if that catch-phrase has any meaning -- but this is merely a secondary consequence. The moral justification for capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man's rational nature, that it protects man's survival qua man, and that its ruling principle is: justice”

“Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism uncontaminated by private profit-seeking. Both are bankrupt. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left.”

“Hermeneutics is a way of looking at Being as an inheritance that is never considered as ultimate data. Capitalism has always grown by considering, or forcing another to consider, as a 'natural' possession what is inherited. The great dominating families are really the inheritors of the strongest pirates, thieves, and bandits, and they consider themselves entitled to command through a divine or natural law, when they really are only the result of a forgotten 'violence'.”

“The paradigm of competition is a race: by rewarding the winner, we encourage everyone to run faster. When capitalism really works this way, it does a good job; but its defenders are wrong in assuming it always works this way.”

“..where effective competition can be created, it is a better way of guiding individual efforts than any other... regards competition as superior not only because it is in most circumstances the most efficient method known but even more because it is the only method by which our activities can be adjusted to each other without coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority.”

“If this really is true, then greed really isn't good, after all. It really isn't the way to maximize the best possible outcome. We really do need to come together and act collectively. Government isn't always the problem. It's sometimes the solution. And, so their whole intellectual scaffolding collapses. So, they'd rather deny the science.”

“The collapse of the world's banking system and the impending disaster of accelerating climate change are not separate phenomena. They are simply the most visible symptoms of a particular model of capitalism that will bring civilisation to its knees. But those symptoms will not get sorted unless and until we commit to a radical transformation of the way we create and distribute wealth in the world today”

“Government control of the economy, no matter in whose behalf, has been the source of all the evils in our industrial society -- and the solution is laissez-faire capitalism, i.e., the abolition of any and all forms of intervention in production and trade, the separation of State and Economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of Church and State.”

“I don't think that the contradictions between capitalism and socialism can be resolved by war. This is no longer the age of the bow and arrow. It's the nuclear age, and war can annihilate us all. The only way to achieve solutions seems to be for the different social systems to coexist.”