Browsing Quotes With Tag: capitalism (9)
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[The] great embarrassing fact that haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft. More than anything else, the endless recitation of the myth of barter, employed much like an incantation, is the economists’ way of fending off any possibility of having to confront it.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:37 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Just as the United States had managed to largely get rid of the problem of political corruption by making the bribery of legislators effectively legal (it was redefined as “lobbying”), so the problem of loan-sharking was brushed aside by making real interest rates of 25 percent, 50 percent, or even in some cases (for instance for payday loans) 120 percent annually, once typical only of organized crime, perfectly legal — and therefore, enforceable no longer by just hired goons and the sort of people who place mutilated animals on their victims’ doorsteps, but by judges, lawyers, bailiffs, and police.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:33 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I see, therefore, the rentier aspect of capitalism as a transitional phase which will disappear when it has done its work. And with the disappearance of its rentier aspect much else in it besides will suffer a sea-change. It will be, moreover, a great advantage of the order of events which I am advocating, that the euthanasia of the rentier, of the functionless investor, will be nothing sudden, merely a gradual but prolonged continuance of what we have seen recently in Great Britain, and will need no revolution.
Speaker: John Maynard KeynesSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:32 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Capitalism is a system that enshrines the gambler as an essential part of its operation, in a way that no other ever has.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:29 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Such imaginary constructs are of course what scientists refer to as “models,” and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with them. Actually I think a fair case can be made that we cannot think without them. The problem with such models — at least, it always seems to happen when we model something called “the market” — is that, once created, we have a tendency to treat them as objective realities, or even fall down before them and start worshiping them as gods. “We must obey the dictates of the market!”
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:29 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:27 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Speaker: Upton SinclairSource: Predictably IrrationalPosted: 09 Feb 2014 at 5:16 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Justice is always lost where Trade is concerned.
Speaker: Paolo BacigalupiSource: the Windup GirlPosted: 21 Sep 2013 at 6:58 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Capitalism is about turning luxuries into necessities.
Speaker: Andrew CarnegiePosted: 05 Nov 2009 at 7:16 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment!