For
the economy I want workers and consumers to have control
over their own economic lives. I want everyone to
have fair conditions that fully utilize their talents
and potentials. I want incomes that accord with the
efforts people expend in their labors. I want what
is produced, by whom, under what conditions, and with
who consuming the result--all determined in accord
with enhancing human well-being and development and
all decided by the people involved and affected. I
want an end to hierarchies of power and wealth and
to class division with most actors subordinated to
an elite few. To accomplish all these ends I favor
the institutions of participatory economics -- worker
and consumer councils, remuneration for effort and
sacrifice, balanced job complexes, and participatory
planning. If someone should demonstrate that those
institutions somehow fail to accomplish necessary
economic functions or have social or personal by-products
that outweigh their benefits -- I would simply return
to the drawing board. Exploitation, alienation, poverty,
disempowerment, fragmenting and debilitating labor,
production for the profit of a few -- much less harsh
homelessness, starvation, and degradation -- are not
like gravity. They arise from institutional relations
established by human beings. New institutions, also
established by human beings, can generate other vastly
superior outcomes. Defining and working to attain
those new institutions ought to be our economic agenda.
-- Michael Albert
The
purpose of economic theory is to make those who are
comfortable FEEL comfortable.
-- Lord Balogh
I
think it must be conceded that it is possible to create
a society in which the response to market failure
is not a swing to socialism, but an exacerbation of
individual efforts to stay ahead by making and spending
yet more money. Does the public health service have
long waiting lists and inadequate facilities? Buy
private insurance. Has public transport broken down?
Buy a car for each member of the family above driving
age. Has the countryside been built over or the footpaths
eradicated? Buy some elaborate exercise machinery
and work out at home. Is air pollution intolerable?
Buy an air-filtering unit and stay indoors. Is what
comes out of the tap foul to the taste and chock-full
of carcinogens? Buy bottled water. And so on. We know
it can all happen because it has: I have been doing
little more than describing Southern California. Now
it is worth noticing two things about the private
substitutes that I have described. The first is that
in the aggregate they are probably much more expensive
than would be the implementation of the appropriate
public policy. The second is that they are extremely
poor replacements for the missing outcomes of good
public policy. Nevertheless, it is plain that the
members of a society can become so alienated from
one another, so mistrustful of any form of collective
action, that they prefer to go it alone.
-- Brian Barry
|
People
nowadays interchange gifts and favors out
of friendship, but buying and selling is considered
absolutely inconsistent with the mutual benevolence
which should prevail between citizens and
the sense of community of interest which supports
our social system. According to our ideas,
buying and selling is essentially anti-social
in all its tendencies. It is an education
in self-seeking at the expense of others,
and no society whose citizens are trained
in such a school can possibly rise above a
very low grade of civilization
-- Edward
Bellamy
|
|
"People
would do well to ask themselves how many of their
ambitions and aspirations derive from the type of
economic system they inhabit and the insecurity and
exhaustion it creates, and question the sense and
purpose of a society where control of a large portion
of life is abdicated under contract in the labour
market, and where immense creativity and potential
is stifled by the need to do difficult and repetitive
tasks in order to earn a wage."
-- Tony Benn
"The
nature of the economic system should be a matter for
public choice, and free market capitalism should not
be accepted without any discussion of the rich variety
of alternatives ... Unlike civil laws, economic laws
are imposed on people with all the authority of immutable
laws of nature. But the economy is created by people,
supported by government intervention, regulation,
statute and subsidy, and implemented in such a way
that it gives substantial wealth and power to a privileged
few, while the majority face a life of relentless
work, stress and periodic financial insecurity."
-- Tony Benn
It
is no longer a single historical world--as it has
been from the beginning of the nineteenth century
onwards. Nor is it any longer ours. We, in our culture
of commodities, are living our crisis; the rest of
the world are living theirs. Our crisis is that we
no longer believe in a future. Their crisis is us.
The most we want is to hang on to what we've got.
They want the means to live. That is why our principal
preoccupations have become private and our public
discourse is compounded of spite. The historical and
cultural space for public speech, for public hopes
and action, has been dismantled. We live and have
our being today in private coverts.
-- John Berger
Why
are we so zealous, then, about the private sector?
We persist in designating a large part of the economy
as private so that we can disavow public responsibility
for its evils and claim individual merit for its blessings.
As a civic body, we are reluctant to countenance and
cure the deprivations of the poor, the damage to the
environment, and the trivialization of culture that
are the depressing concomitants of our advanced industrial
economy. At the same time applauding the rich and
powerful who claim their privileges as the fruits
of their rugged and individual efforts, we sanction
our positions and our aspirations
-- Albert Borgmann
|
|
Economics
has been incurably growth-oriented and addicted
to everybody growing richer, even at the cost
of exhaustion of resources and pollution of
the environment.
--
Kenneth
Boulding
|
When
everything is worth money, then money is worth nothing.
-- David Byrne
We
have created not a Brave New World, but a vulgar marketplace,
where human attributes come with a price tag.
-- Linda Chavez
Why
should workers agree to be slaves in a basically
authoritarian structure? They should have
control over it themselves. Why shouldn?t
communities have a dominant voice in running
the institutions that affect their lives?
-- Noam
Chomsky
|
|
The
real world of American society is one which it is
very misleading to call simply a democracy. Of course,
it is in a sense a democracy, but it is one in which
there are enormous inequities in the distribution
of power and force. For example, the entire commercial
and industrial system is in principle excluded from
the democratic process, including everything that
goes on within it
-- Noam
Chomsky
Representative
democracy, as in, say, the United States or Great
Britain, would be criticized by an anarchist of this
school on two grounds. First of all because there
is a monopoly of power centralized in the State, and
secondly?and critically?because representative democracy
is limited to the political sphere and in no serious
way encroaches on the economic sphere. Anarchists
of this tradition have always held that democratic
control of one?s productive life is at the core of
any serious human liberation, or, for that matter,
of any significant democratic practice. That is, as
long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves
on the market to those who are willing to hire them,
as long as their role in production is simply that
of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements
of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy
very limited, if even meaningful.
-- Noam
Chomsky
All
public resources go to the rich. The poor, if they
can survive in the labor market, fine. Otherwise,
they die. That's economics in a nutshell.
-- Noam
Chomsky
In
a country well governed poverty is something to be
ashamed of. In a country badly governed wealth is
something to be ashamed of.
-- Confucius
The
superior person understands rightness; the inferior
person understands profit
-- Confucius
 |
We
want a system in which the worker shall get
what he produces and the capitalist shall
produce what he gets.
-- Euguene
V. Debs
The
economic owning class is always the political
ruling class.
-- Euguene
V. Debs
|
The
ultimate aim of production is not production
of goods but the production of free human beings
associated with one another on terms of equality.
-- John
Dewey
|
|
 |
"This
crippling of individuals I consider the worst
evil of capitalism. Our whole educational
system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated
competitive attitude is inculcated into the
student, who is trained to worship acquisitive
success as a preparation for his future. I
am convinced there is only one way to eliminate
these grave evils, namely through the establishment
of a socialist economy, accompanied by an
educational system which would be oriented
toward social goals."
-- Albert
Einstein
|
Viewed
as a means to the end of political freedom, economic
arrangements are important because of their effect
on the concentration or dispersion of power. The kind
of economic organization that provides economic freedom
directly, namely, competitive capitalism, also promotes
political freedom because it separates economic power
from political power and in this way enables the one
to offset the other
-- Milton Friedman
The
accepted ideas of any period are singularly those
that serve the dominant economic interest...What economists
believe and teach, whether in the United States or
in the Soviet Union, is rarely hostile to the institutions
-- the private business enterprise, the Communist
Party -- that reflect the dominant economic power.
Not to notice this takes effort, although many succeed.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
From
the point of view of the economy, the sale of weapons
is indistinguishable from the sale of food. When a
building collapses or a plane crashes, it?s rather
inconvenient from the point of view of those inside,
but it?s altogether convenient for the growth of the
gross national product, which sometimes ought to be
called the "gross criminal product."
-- Eduardo Galeano
So
long as all the increased wealth which modern progress
brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase
luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House
of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real
and cannot be permanent.
-- Henry George
|
|
I
think our main foreign policy is economic
policy but to think that economic policy is
not environmental policy is to sort of, miss
the point. You know you can't have economic
development without impact on the biosphere.
~ Randy
Hayes
Economic
policy turns out to be the most important
environmental policy.
~ Randy
Hayes
|
If
we assume that the purpose of the economy is to serve
and improve the welfare of the entire body of citizens,
the U.S. model has clearly been a major failure. It
has served a minority, and the majority have not only
failed to share in the income gains yielded by the
model, they have suffered from reduced benefits, greater
job instability and stress, and a diminution of expectations
and sense of hope for the future.
-- Edward S. Herman
American
consumerism is about buying things we don't need,
with money we don't have, to impress friends we don't
have time for.
-- Leo Horrigan
The
gross national product includes air pollution
and advertising for cigarettes, and ambulances
to clear our highways of carnage. It counts
special locks for our doors, and jails for the
people who break them ... It does not allow
for the health of our families, the quality
of thier education, or the joy of their play.
-- Robert
F. Kennedy |
 |
The
love of money as a possession--as distinguished from
the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and
realities of life--will be recognized for what it
is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those
semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which
one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in
mental disease
-- John Maynard Keynes
|
We
must recognize that we can't solve our problems
now until there is a radical redistribution
of economic and political power....[What is
required is] a radical restructuring of the
architecture of American society.
--
Martin
Luther King, Jr
|
 |
But
once we concede that people do care about status,
it necessarily follows that the status competition
that makes people buy expensive consumer goods in
order to impress other people constitutes a failure
of the market economy - a failure as real as traffic
congestion, or pollution, or any other activity in
which the individual pursuit of self-interest leads
to a collectively bad outcome. Suppose that we could
somehow agree to stop competing over who has the fanciest
car; everyone could then work a bit less, spend more
time with their families, and raise the sum total
of human happiness. Or to put it a bit differently,
Americans (or at least the top few percent of the
income distribution) have gotten into a sort of arms
race of conspicuous consumption that, like most arms
races, consumes huge quantities of resources yet in
the end changes little.
--Paul Krugman
|
"This
focus on money and power may do wonders in
the marketplace, but it creates a tremendous
crisis in our society. People who have spent
all day learning how to sell themselves and
to manipulate others are in no position to
form lasting friendships or intimate relationships...
Many Americans hunger for a different kind
of society -- one based on principles of caring,
ethical and spiritual sensitivity, and communal
solidarity. Their need for meaning is just
as intense as their need for economic security."
-- Michael
Lerner
|
|
 |
I
confess that I am not charmed with the ideal
of life held out by those who think that the
normal state of human beings is that of struggling
to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing,
and treading on each other's heels, which
form the existing type of social life, are
the most desirable lot of human beings
-- John
Stuart Mill
|
These
temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism,
seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature,
and, instead of lifting their eyes to the
God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty
Dollar.
~ John
Muir
|
|
Anyway
that's a large part of what economics is -- people
arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical
values to non-numerical things. And then pretending
that they haven't just made the numbers up, which
they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense,
except that economics serves to justify the current
power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers
among the powerful
-- Kim Stanley Robinson
The
first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought
of saying, 'This is mine' and found people simple
enough to believe him was the real founder of civil
society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many
miseries and horrors might the human race had been
spared by the one who, upon pulling up the stakes
or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his fellow
men: 'Beware of listening to this imposter; you are
lost if you forget the fruits of the earth belong
to all and that the earth belongs to no one.
Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1755
 |
Advocates
of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the
sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied
in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained
in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate
-- Bertrand
Russell
|
Our
civilization is locked in the grip of an ideology
- corporatism. An ideology that denies and undermines
the legitimacy of individuals as the citizen in a
democracy. The particular imbalance of this ideology
leads to a worship of self-interest and a denial of
the public good. The practical effects on the individual
are passivity and conformism in the areas that matter,
and non-conformism in the areas that don't
-- John Ralston Saul
The
acceptance of corporatism causes us to deny and undermine
the legitimacy of the individual as citizen in a democracy.
The result of such a denial is a growing imbalance
which leads to our adoration of self-interest and
our denial of the public good.
-- John Ralston Saul
|
|
Infinite
growth of material consumption in a finite
world is an impossibility.
~
E.
F. Schumacher
|
In
the current vocabulary of condemnation there are few
words as final and conclusive as the word "uneconomic."
If an activity has been branded as uneconomic, its
right to existence is not merely questioned but energetically
denied. Anything that is found to be an impediment
to economic growth is a shameful thing, and if people
cling to it, they are thought of as either saboteurs
or fools. Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying
or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the
world or to the well-being of future generations;
as long as you have not shown it to be "uneconomic"
you have not really questioned its right to exist,
grow, and prosper.
~ E.
F. Schumacher
Economic
policies absorb almost the entire attention of government,
and at the same time become ever more impotent. The
simplest things, which only fifty years ago one could
do without difficulty, cannot get done any more. The
richer a society, the more impossible it become to
do worthwhile things without immediate payoff.
~ E.
F. Schumacher
|
The
only way in which a nation can make itself
wealthy and prosperous is by good housekeeping:
that is, by providing for its wants in the
order of their importance, and allowing no
money to be wasted on whims and luxuries until
necessities have been thoroughly served.
-- George
Bernard Shaw
|
|
Capitalism
drives the employers to do their worst to the employed,
and the employed to do the least for them. And it
boasts all the time of the incentive it provides to
both to do their best! . . . The reason the Capitalist
system has worked so far without jamming for more
than a few months at a time, and then only in places,
is that it has not yet succeeded in making a conquest
of human nature so complete that everybody acts on
strictly business principles.
-- George
Bernard Shaw
Hear
me, people: We have now to deal with another race-
small and feeble when our fathers first met them,
but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they
have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession
is a disease with them. These people have made many
rules that the rich may break but the poor may not.
They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support
the rich and those who rule.
-- Chief Sitting Bull
Civil
government, so far as it is instituted for the security
of property, is in reality instituted for the defense
of the rich against the poor, or of those who have
some property against those who have none at all.
--Adam Smith
All
for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems,
in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim
of the masters of mankind.
-- Adam Smith
What
is economics? A science invented by the upper class
in order to acquire the fruits of the labor of the
underclass
-- August Strindberg
Sell
a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as
well as the earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them
all for the use of his children?
-- Tecumseh
Democracy and capitalism have very different beliefs
about the proper distribution of power. One believes
in a completely equal distribution of political power,
?one man, one vote?, while the other believes that
it is the duty of the economically fit to drive the
unfit out of business and into economic extinction.
?Survival of the fittest? and inequalities in purchasing
power is what capitalist efficiency is all about.
Individuals and firms become efficient to be rich.
To put it in its starkest form, capitalism is perfectly
compatible with slavery. The American South had such
a system for more than two centuries. Democracy is
not comparable with slavery.
-- Lester Thurow
 |
The
essence of all slavery consists in taking the
product of another's labor by force. It is immaterial
whether this force be founded upon ownership
of the slave or ownership of the money that
he must get to live.
-- Leo
Tolstoy |
In
war the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace
the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to
live, and they give us such mean wages that we die.
We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold
in their coffers, and our children fade away before
their time, and the faces of those we love become
hard and evil. We tread out the grapes, and another
drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our own board
is empty. We have chains, though no eyes behold them;
and are slaves, though men call us free.
-- Oscar Wilde
See
Also Quotes on
Globalization
| Labor
| End
Poverty | Fair
Trade
WorkersDay.com
- May 1
FairTradeDay.com
- May 13*
EndPovertyDay.com
- October 17
BuyNothingDayInfo.com
- November 26
