Money Quotations

©2008-2009 Roedy Green, Canadian Mind Products
Quotations are selected from this pool (and other quotation pools) in a pseudorandom way every 30 minutes and inserted at the top and bottom of some of the major pages on this website.

A deficit is a tax compounded with interest for late payment.
~ Anonymous

Everyone is a socialist when his house is on fire.
~ Anonymous

[Dr. Edward Livingstone Trudeau] well said, “There is a rich man’s tuberculosis and a poor man’s tuberculosis. The rich man recovers and the poor man dies.” This succinctly expresses the close embrace of economics and pathology.
~ Dr. Norman Bethune (born: 1890-03-04 died: 1939-11-12 at age: 49)

A drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it.
~ Samuel Butler (born: 1835-12-04 died: 1902-06-18 at age: 66)

All progress is based on a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
~ Samuel Butler (born: 1835-12-04 died: 1902-06-18 at age: 66)

Unemployment is capitalism’s way of getting you to plant a garden.
~ Orson Scott Card (born: 1951-08-24 age: 58)

The American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.
~ George Carlin (born: 1937-05-12 died: 2008-06-22 at age: 71)

Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.
~ Noam Chomsky (born: 1928-12-07 age: 80)

One of the dirty little secrets of today’s international order is that the rest of the globe could topple the United States from its hegemonic status whenever they so choose with a concerted abandonment of the dollar standard. This is America’s preeminent, inescapable Achilles Heel for now and the foreseeable future.
~ W. Clark

Monsanto — through acquisitions and cut-throat business practices — has cornered 90% of the soy, 65% of the corn, and 70% of the cotton market, and has a rapidly growing presence in the fruit and vegetable market, all without government anti-trust officials raising an eyebrow.
~ Adam Claus of Credo

Mr. Micawber was waiting for me within the gate, and we went up to his room (top story but one), and cried very much. He solemnly conjured me, I remember, to take warning by his fate; and to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a-year for his income, and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy, but that if he spent twenty pounds one he would be miserable.
~ Charles Dickens (born: 1812-02-07 died: 1870-06-09 at age: 58) David Copperfield

A billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.
~ Everett Dirksen (born: 1896-01-04 died: 1969-09-07 at age: 73)

The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under bridges.
~ Anatole France (born: 1844-04-16 died: 1924-10-12 at age: 80)

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith (born: 1908-10-15 died: 2006-04-29 at age: 97)

There is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed.
~ Mahatma Gandhi (born: 1869-10-02 died: 1948-01-30 at age: 78)

At a certain level, our modern consumer society is built on a truth and a lie. The truth is that if you’re living below Maslow’s Threshold of safety and security, a little bit of “stuff” can make a huge change in your mental and emotional states, and the quality of your life. If you’re outside alone at night, naked and cold, your’re miserable,. If somebody brings you inside, gives you clothes to wear, a warm blanket, a fire to sit by, warm food to eat, and a comfortable bed to sleep in, then you move from “unhappy” to “happy” pretty fast.
The lie is the siren song of our culture. “If that much stuff will generate that much instant happiness” the lie goes, “then ten times as much stuff will make you ten times happier. A hundred times as much stuff will make you a hundred times happier. A thousand times as much stuff will make you a thousand times happier. And it follows that Bill Gates lives in a state of perpetual bliss!”
~ Thom Hartmann (born: 1951-05-07 age: 58) Threshold: the Crisis of Western Culture page 14

Conservatives view taxes as a confiscation of wealth: the government is taking my money. For liberals taxes are the price of admission to civilised society — It’s our money. Liberals view taxes as the reasonable and appropriate way to fund an investment in society and the future. From the liberal point of view, if somebody doesn’t want to pay taxes, they’re a freeloader.
~ Thom Hartmann (born: 1951-05-07 age: 58) Cracking the Code page 95.
Who do the conservatives imagine should pay for all those wars they are so fond of, the nuclear missiles, all the police, the prisons, the water, the sewers, the roads, the border patrols…?

Many conservatives don’t hold as a primary value the ideas of living in a society in which everyone has choices. They believe in a dominator model — that some people should be the “deciders” and that others should do what the “deciders” say. Conservatives who are members of the religious right in particular tend to believe that men are the deciders and the women should abide by their decisions.
~ Thom Hartmann (born: 1951-05-07 age: 58) Cracking the Code page 151.

The Gulf states, China, Russia, France and Japan intend to bring an end to conducting oil deals in US dollars, switching instead to a basket of currencies, including a new Gulf state currency, by 2018.
~ Thom Hartmann (born: 1951-05-07 age: 58)
Heretofore the USA has enjoyed a huge advantage over other countries through bullying other countries into conducting all their petroleum transactions in US dollars. The following benefits will end with the demise of the US petrodollar:
US banks get fees every time other countries exchange local currencies to or from US dollars for petroleum purchases or sales.

When the US prints a trillion dollars of new money, instead of causing rampant inflation, other countries quickly sweep these dollars up for use as petrodollars.

Petrodollars give the USA a way to effectively tax people in foreign countries. When Americans print money, they get to spend the money, and the value of all the foreign petrodollar holdings drop. Foreign petrodollar holders are effectively paying a US wealth tax.

These three factors have given the US economy a free ride. Without a strong manufacturing sector and with dwindling natural resources, it will not be able to remain a superpower once the rest of the world abandons the American petrodollar. That is why the USA invaded Iraq when it went off the petrodollar in 1990 and today threatens Iran for the same reason.

Writing more than two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson argued for a tax on accumulated wealth [aka an estate tax or an IRS death tax as the Republican call it] because he knew that if [great] wealth were passed down from one generation to the next, those lucky inheritors would turn into new aristocrats.
~ Thom Hartmann (born: 1951-05-07 age: 58) Cracking the Code page 129.

If China were to have even a 10% grain shortfall, it would have to buy up 25% of the world export grain market to compensate. Think what that would do to grain prices!
~ Thomas Homer-Dixon (born: 1956 age: 53) in Energy and Climate Change: A Sustainable Future?

Around the world people are dying, ecosystems are crumbling, and economies face ruin because of climate change, and all Bush and the oil industry can think of is how to maximise their profits and continue business as usual.
~ Paul Horsman , Greenpeace spokesperson

A debt of service is due from every man to his country proportional to the bounties which nature and fortune have measured to him.
~ Thomas Jefferson (born: 1743-04-13 died: 1826-07-04 at age: 83)

I sincerely believe… that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
~ Thomas Jefferson (born: 1743-04-13 died: 1826-07-04 at age: 83) to John Taylor, 1816

If the people ever allow the banks to issue their currency, the banks and corporations which will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property, until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered..
~ Thomas Jefferson (born: 1743-04-13 died: 1826-07-04 at age: 83)
Banks don’t literally print money, but they create trillions of dollars by lending money they don’t actually have.

The end of democracy, and the defeat of the American revolution will occur when government falls into the hands of the lending institutions and moneyed incorporations.
~ Thomas Jefferson (born: 1743-04-13 died: 1826-07-04 at age: 83)

There is an artificial aristocracy, founded on birth and privilege, without virtue or talents… The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provisions should be made to prevent its ascendency.
~ Thomas Jefferson (born: 1743-04-13 died: 1826-07-04 at age: 83)
Jefferson’s plan was for estate taxes or what Republicans call “death taxes”. This will help create a level playing field, rather than one where a few rich families dominated the country by generations of accumulated wealth purely from investment. After you are dead is the least painful time to pay your taxes.

The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyment 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 (born: 1883-06-05 died: 1946-04-21 at age: 62)

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.
~ David Herbert Lawrence (born: 1885-09-11 died: 1930-03-02 at age: 44)

I want to know why there is always so much money for war and so little for human condition. If we launch a war on Iraq, the world will find $7 billion, $8 billion, $10 billion, a month for bombing, but there’s always a huge shortage of funds required to fight AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis.
~ Stephen Lewis (born: 1937-11-11 age: 72)

Government has no other end, but the preservation of property.
~ John Locke (born: 1632-08-29 died: 1704-10-28 at age: 72) 1795-04-20
This the Republican philosophy baldly stated. They see the role of government is to help the wealthy hang onto their wealth, (or increase it), period.

Our incomes are like our shoes; if too small, they gall and pinch us; but if too large, they cause us to stumble and to trip.
~ John Locke (born: 1632-08-29 died: 1704-10-28 at age: 72)

History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit and violent means possible, to maintain their control over governments, by controlling money and its issuance.
~ James Madison (born: 1751-03-16 died: 1836-06-28 at age: 85)
How little has changed!

There is an evil which ought to be guarded against, in the indefinite accumulation of property, from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by… corporations. The power of all corporations aught to be limited in this respect. The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses.
~ James Madison (born: 1751-03-16 died: 1836-06-28 at age: 85) 1817
Similarly, estate (death) taxes are a good thing because they prevent a landed nobility class. Further, if you have to pay taxes, the least painful time is when you are dead, or when you have just received an inheritance windfall.

In 1979 the top 1% of Americans got 8% of the economic pie. In 2008 it grew to 23%.
~ Bill Maher (born: 1956-01-20 age: 53)

Men do not desire to be rich, only to be richer than other men.
~ John Stuart Mill (born: 1806-05-20 died: 1873-05-08 at age: 66)

Don’t be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.
~ Arthur Miller (born: 1915-10-17 died: 2005-02-10 at age: 89)

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.
~ Edward R. Murrow (born: 1908-04-25 died: 1965-04-27 at age: 57)

In 1998 only $40 billion US was needed to bring basic health, education, clear water, sanitation, to the world’s poorest citizens. Gates alone could afford that and still have $11 billion left; he owns more than the 100 million poorest American citizen combined.
~ United Nations United Nations Human Development Report 1998-09-09

What do you think a stimulus is? It’s spending — that’s the whole point! Seriously.
~ Barack Obama (born: 1961-08-04 age: 48)

The world’s 300 richest people are worth more than the world’s poorest 3,000,000,000. Between 1983 and 1997, 85.5% of the increase in America’s wealth was captured by the richest 1%. Overall US income rocketed — of which 80% of Americans saw 0%.
~ Greg Palast (born: 1952 age: 57)

When you were a child your parents taught you not to take money from strangers and not to take money from your friends. Who does that leave? Known enemies!
~ Sondra Ray

A queen bee gets a bigger share of the honey than an ordinary worker, but she is expected to use that extra nutrition for the benefit of the colony, not for her personal pleasure. In human society, those who receive a 10,000+ times bigger share than usual are expected to waste it on conspicuous consumption that has no purpose other than ostentation.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

A recession is purely a psychological problem. There just as much food, minerals, labour and resources as in boom times. It is just that everyone loses faith in the mad economic game and simultaneously pull in their horns, causing a collapse in productivity. No other animal suffers from an analogous foolishness of self-created shortages. Governments should cut spending and save in boom times so they will have a fund to spend lavishly in the next recession to prime the pump. However, they tend to do the exact opposite which exaggerates the swings.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

According to a Harvard study, far more Americans die every month, month after month, from lack of health insurance than died on 9/11. Yet Michael Steele, head of the Republican party, assures Americans there is no need to take any action.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

After watching the insurance companies and big pharma corrupt politicians, fund astroturf organisations and spread the most outrageous lies, I can’t imagine why any American would entrust them with their health care.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

America and China have formed such a tight financial partnership that Niall Ferguson, the author of The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, refers to them as Chimerica. China does all the lending, America all the borrowing. China produces the goods, and America consumes them. China does the saving and America the shopping. It is only a matter of time until China pulls the plug on America.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

America is so addicted to conspicuous consumption that its has borrowed to the hilt, outsourced its manufacturing and sold off its corporations and real estate to foreigners. Images that come to mind:
Someone who has lost his fortune, trying to fool everyone including himself by keeping up appearances with reckless borrowing.

A drug addict selling her blood for heroin.

The spent husk of a bee after a spider [the military contractors] has sucked it dry.

Tent caterpillars stripping bare the tree that sustains them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Americans are so patriotic they refuse to notice they are paying twice what anyone else does for health care while they enjoy the worst health in the developed world, with the worst infant mortality, even when Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, tells them the facts. They have an almost religious attachment to being ripped off. It is a Good Thing™ Americans long ago adopted indoor plumbing or they would also be claiming outhouses were superior to flush toilets.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Americans have an informal scheme for ranking the value of a life. You get points for having more years of expected remaining life. You get points for having education. You get massive numbers of points for having money. You lose points for having health problems, a disability, dark skin or a drug addiction. So the value of the life of an elderly disabled homeless person is negative. This is why Republicans are so violently opposed to universal health care. They don’t want to waste resources on lives that they consider worthless. To the Republican, it is even more important to ensure unworthies don’t get health care than it is to ensure they get it for themselves.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

As automation becomes more adept, the value of labour will decline. This will require a revolution in thinking about economics. Labour will become superfluous. People will have to acquire goods simply as a right much the way they picked them for the taking when they were hunter gatherers. The accumulation of objects will be seen as absurd as a bag lady’s compulsion to collect string.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

As the oil runs out, the green revolution (agriculture based of fossil fuels for tractors, fertilisers and pesticides) will end. The price of food will soar. The rich man will be the one with land and knowledge to grow food organically.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Awed by the bounty of the “unseen hand”, Americans have turned capitalism into a fundamentalist religion. Anyone who questions the utter perfection of American capitalism as it stands is labeled a commie, and driven to the edges of society for his unforgivable heresy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Between 1950 and 1995 the American federal government funded between 50 and 70% of the country’s research and development. What are the chances the USA would be a world technology leader today had the government not “interfered” like that?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
Not all things that are absolutely necessary are highly profitable. That’s the job of government.

Between 2007 and 2008 the price of shipping a container from China to New York jumped from $3000 to $8000 USD. Rising oil prices are the primary cause. As cheap fossil fuel energy runs out, we will see reverse globalisation. Manufacturing of goods and growing of food will have to happen closer and closer to home, simply because it will be prohibitively expensive to ship it from abroad. We will see a reversal of the outsourcing trend, except for virtual goods like computer programming and movies that don’t require shipping.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Billionaires imagine they are indispensible and hence worthy of infinite pampering because they employ people. If all the billionaires disappeared overnight, the need for goods would be just as strong. We would fulfill it just as we did before there were billionaires.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Canadians firmly believe that all Canadians are entitled to unlimited top notch medical care, whether they can afford it or not. Canadians somewhat less firmly believe that no Canadian should be allowed to starve to death. However, Canadians are quite happy to see the poor go without shelter, unless the mercury drops substantially below freezing. This is odd, given that housing the homeless would cost a minute fraction of the cost of universal medical care. Politicians confess that the cost of housing the homeless would be considerably less than the costs of homelessness (e.g. extra policing, emergency room use). The reason for the reluctance to end homelessness is not about money, it is because is most Canadians despise the homeless and want to see them suffer. It is similar to racist attitudes in the USA.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Capitalism requires competition. When you don’t have it, the government must regulate the monopolies to prevent them from gouching and cheating the public. The health insurance companies have effectively eliminated competition by mergers and acquisitions. According to the American Medical Association, in 94% of America there is no longer a competitive market. The insurance companies have bribed American politicians to prevent them from introducing either regulation or competition from a public option. The insurance companies have a sweet deal, keeping $2 for every $1 they pass on to the doctors, and are willing to tell any lie, bribe, threaten, anything to keep things as they are. What is so astounding is the way they have bamboozled so many Americans into helping them fight the competition needed for capitalism to function.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Capitalism, like all economic systems, has its limitations. What is peculiar is that so many people imagine that if capitalism is incapable of delivering something, e.g. a new antibiotic, a low cost AIDS treatment, universal health care, alternative energy or cruelty-free fur, meats and eggs… then they have no alternative but to go without it. It is as though they see seeking something though auxiliary means would be a sort of monetary adultery, breaking vows of holy matrimony and monogamous fidelity to capitalism. The true believers can’t imagine augmenting or modifying capitalism, only abandoning it entirely.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Capitalists are neo-Darwinists who imagine humans prevail over other species by ruthlessly culling the weak and poor. They fail to notice that individual humans are puny animals. The secret of their success is intelligent co-operation.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Consider the following types of theft:
A mugger steals a purse.

An oil exec gouges his customers.

A preacher cons his flock into donating money “for God” and uses it to rent hookers.

A CEO tricks investors into buying his worthless stock.

An Israeli Jew confiscates the land of a Palestinian.
When a poor man steals from a rich man, we insist he give back the wealth. When a rich man steals from a poor man, we don’t. Further, if the poor man tries to snatch back what was stolen from him, we treat him as the thief.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Corporate power has completely corrupted America, all the way to the White House. Even Obama lied to the American people that the General Motors and Chrysler bailout was an investment and that they would get their money back. Corrupt politicians shoveled bail out money at failing investment banks and AIG, allowing executives to give themselves multimillion dollar bonuses, supposedly for wisely shepherding the finances of their companies.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Corporate TV serves the advertisers. Public TV serves the viewers. The function of corporate TV content is to lull the viewer’s mind to a thought-free relaxed state to maximise receptivity to advertising.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Corporations are like children. They will play by almost any imaginable rules/regulations so long as they have a fair chance of winning/making a profit.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Corporations behave much like drug addicts. Neither care about the safety or well being of others. Both are totally focussed on acquiring but a single thing. Both sacrifice their own long term interest for immediate gratification. Both maintain a phony front to help them take advantage of others.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Corporations feed the public junk food, junk ideas and junk science because somebody in the corporation computed it would improve the next quarter profit. This is how drug addicts think — concerned only for short term pleasure, damn the consquences.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Cunning, rich Republicans duped ordinary Americans into repealing the estate tax paid only by the richest man in every 300, by labelling it an “IRS death tax” and convincing them it applied to every American rich and poor. Why take the tax burden off the richest citizens and put it on the shoulders of those much less capable of bearing it? Why take taxes off the dead and put them on the living? When you are dead is the least painful time to pay taxes. Similarly for the heirs, the best time in your life to pay tax without it being onerous is just after a windfall.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Early Americans vilified the Indians to excuse themselves for stealing their lands.

Later, Americans vilified the blacks to excuse themselves for enslaving them and stealing their labour.

Later still, Nazis vilified Jews so they could steal their wealth.

Today, Americans vilify Arab to excuse themselves for stealing their oil.
By now, most of us are sick of excuses.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Ever since 1983 we have been burning oil faster than we have been discovering it. Today oil companies are shutting down exploration attempts because it is no longer cost effective. Even an elementary student can tell you that you can’t keep going business as usual indefinitely, no matter how much the economy, or Prime Minister Harper, commands it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Ever since governments invented borrowing by selling bonds during the Renaissance, they have gone bankrupt by either consecutive deficits or by printing too much money. We do these things today pretending we do not know the inevitable consequences.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Every country chooses how wide a wealth gap it wants. Countries that favour the wealthy to become ever more powerful and rich necessarily force those on the bottom to live in without food, shelter and medicine. Republicans claim the opposite is true. Yet consider the fate of those on the bottom in wide wealth gap countries like the USA, Russia, India and Brazil versus the fate of those in narrow wealth gap countries like Canada, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Germany. In the 1950s the USA was a narrow gap country and primarily under Reagan and Bush-41 became a wide gap country.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Exxon Mobile uses a incredibly narrow-minded decision-making process. To decide what do to about global warming they compute that lying to the public about global warming and opposing all measures to ameliorate it will help them make more profit selling oil and gas in the next quarter. In their view, that global warming leads to mass extinction of most of life on earth is irrelevant. That procrastinating measures to save earth until it is too late is similarly irrelevant. Even the long term bankruptcy of Exxon is irrelevant. All that matters is the next quarter profit.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Foolish politicians try to convince the populace the economy is doing great when it clearly is not. The public will happily forgive them for trying unsuccessfully to remedy the situation, but not for insulting them by telling them they can’t tell a recession when they see one. The public won’t forgive deadbeat politicians who excuse their failure by pretending there is nothing to do.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Free trade is not always the best strategy:
From an energy-conservation, greenhouse gas point of view, it is always best to manufacture goods as close as possible to where they are used.

If other countries put up tariffs to your exports, you cut your own throat if you refuse to extract tariffs on imports from their countries.

Fledgling industries have no chance without protective tariffs. Toyoto would never have become a major automaker without 50 years of protectionist help from the Japanese government.

Industries in the third world have no chance to compete on a free trade basis with behemoths like the China and the USA.

On a security basis, every country should maintain the ability to grow subsistence food and manufacture basic goods should the supply from abroad be cut off.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Given that before an election, politicians always tell the public what they want to hear, how do you decide whom to vote for? Look at the special interests funding each party. That is the biggest predictor of after-election behaviour. For example, in the USA, the Republican party is beholden to big oil, big business, the arms industry, the gun lobby, CEOs, the prison industry and the religious right. The Democratic party is beholden to labour, the poor, immigrants, minorities, gays and small businesses. In Canada, the Conservative party is beholden to big oil, the arms industry and bigots. The Liberal party is beholden to the banks and immigrants. The NDP is beholden to labour and environmentalists. Decide which special interest is most in alignment with your own values and interests.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Globalisation and free trade is on the way out for four reasons:
Transportation costs are rising. Between 2007 and 2008 the price of shipping a container from China to New York jumped from $3000 to $8000 USD.

Environmentally, globalisation creates too much green house gas to ship goods all over the planet.

All that shipping spreads diseases and invasive species.

All that shipping makes smuggling for terrorism duck simple.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Google would be just another obscure search engine were they not permitted to patent the obvious idea that when you show search results, you should first show the ones that other people consider important measured by the number of links there are to them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Governments fire people to save money to use for stimulus packages to give billions to businesses (aka financial contributors), who might conceivably use some of that money to hire people. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to keep people on the payroll, perhaps reducing the work week or pay slightly?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Have you ever noticed the more money a crook steals, the less likely he is to be prosecuted, and if he is prosecuted, the less likely he is do time, and if he does time, the more luxurious the prison? The justice system seems to be sending a message to criminals, “If you are going to steal, steal big, and let us have a cut.” The same principle applies to avoiding penalty by killing people in large numbers.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

How much would it cost you every month if you had to put your kids in private school, hire a security firm to guard your house, hire a private fire fighting service, hire inspectors to check that your food was not contaminated with pesticides or E Coli, hire a paving firm to keep the road in front of your house in good repair, pay tolls to use for-profit roads, get your water from a private water company, hire mercenaries to protect your country, hire someone to scan everyone on the plane you fly on, if you own a company, to send all your employees to school to be trained… The Republican is a freeloader who demands he get all this without paying any taxes for it. This deadbeat wants to sponge off others forcing the least wealthy to pay his fair share of these and thousands of other services provided by the governments we elect.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

I am baffled why Americans grovel so. They know they pay twice what anyone else does for health care. They know all Americans but the very rich receive worse health care than the Cubans. They know big pharma is screwing them. They know the insurance and pharmaceutical corporations have the politicians in their pockets. Yet they are afraid of any change for the better, as if the corporate interests and their own were one in the same.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

I am the only person I know who tripled his money over a lifetime of gambling. My dad explained to me that the only way you had any chance at all was to bet your lifetime gambling stake on one bet. So I put a nickel into a slot machine, won fifteen cents, and decided to quit my gambling career entirely while I was ahead.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

I find most Americans irrational when it come to universal health care. It costs half as much and provides better quality care. Yet Americans are terrified of it since it is an “additional tax”. They conveniently forget they no longer have to pay a private insurance bill. The USA ranks lower than any other developed nation, on par with third world Cuba in quality of health care, yet Americans claim they want to stick with the current system because they don’t want to give up the high quality. They are so stuck in the delusion of American superiority that they refuse to accept their system is not the best in the world.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

I never buy at stores that offer no interest or no payments for two years…. I always pay cash. Why should I pay interest fees hidden in the price for loans I don’t need? Even people who buy on time should avoid such stores. The stores are tricking them into taking out extended hidden loans they don’t need.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

I really wonder about people who claim capitalists should be totally unregulated. Do they imagine everyone would drive safely if we repealed all the traffic laws? That child molestors would become model citizens if we fired the police who monitor them?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

I watched Michael Moore’s documentary Roger and Me. In it, a bailiff evicted Flint Michigan families out of their homes on Christmas. They sat on the sidewalk in the rain with their straggly Christmas trees. There were block after block of boarded up homes. Property values plummeted as the city turned into a ghost town. Can you imagine rabbits being so stupid as to abandon their burrows en masse and freeze in the rain?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

If a mother wanted to teach her kids the elements of laissez-faire capitalism, she would bake a pie then invite the family to play Monopoly. She would then force-feed the winner the entire pie.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

If it were not for the recession putting some people totally out of work, it would not be so bad. It has slowed the pace of life a bit. People don’t feel obligated to spend just to impress the neighbours. People are not working so feverishly and are taking time with their families.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

If there a not the resources to guarantee a child shelter, at least two loving, stable caretakers/parents, medical care and food, then it is immoral, and maybe even should be criminal, to bring such a deprived child into the world.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

If you are in a car accident, the attending doctor first works on your arm hanging by a thread before dealing with your hangnail. In a similar way, economists should attend to those in most pain first, the homeless before the multi-billionaires.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

If you doubt the value of spending on universal literacy programs, study what life is like in times and places that did not have them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

If you subscribe to the view that corporations are better suited to make decisions than elected representatives, if you believe that corporations should be permitted to spend unlimited amounts of money influencing/bribing elected representatives, if you believe there should be no laws constraining corporations, then be honest, you have lost faith in “one man one vote” and subscribe to “one dollar one vote”. If you lived in the middle ages, you would have been advocating government of, for and by the landed nobility.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Imagine a future where every child born is guaranteed shelter, at least two loving, stable, adult caretakers/parents, medical care and food.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Imagine being born a prince and being taught from birth that you were, simply from your status as a prince, not from any special skill or talent, specially favoured of God and vastly more worthy than ordinary men. Imagine being taught your privilege extended to taking anything you wanted from any non-prince, including their time, wives, daughters or sons. Imagine being taught that anyone who resisted your will was a terrorist who deserved the death penalty. Now you know what is like to born Israeli or American.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

In 1929, just prior the great depression, the richest 1% of Americans owned 50% of the wealth. In the prosperous 60s, they owned 25%.
At the start of the Bush-43 depression, the rate was back up over 50% again. Consider the possibility that extremes in wealth distribution might cause economic instability. In America’s most prosperous times, the rich paid a whopping 91% income tax. Reagan lowered it to 28% while simultaneously raising it for everyone else from 11% to 15%. Bush-43 lowered capital gains taxes on the rich.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

In a boom economy, cash is king. In a collapsed economy, inventory is emperor.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

In a recession, there is the same amount of money in the universe as usual, it is just the prices of almost everything are lower, including houses and stocks. Yet oddly people refuse to buy. They want to wait until the prices are high again. Yet everyone claims they understand the principle, buy low, sell high as the road to wealth.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

In an ideal capitalist system, the companies that produce the best quality goods, at the lowest price with the least environmental impact, prosper and the rest go bankrupt. Capitalism can’t work unless the consumers have a mechanism at least as powerful as advertising to punish the companies that produce shoddy, overpriced, dishonestly marketed or environmentally unfriendly goods using the law or exposure. Without such a mechanism, the dishonest companies have an unfair advantage over the decent ones, and the wrong companies prevail.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

In Nevada, slot machines are required by law to pay back at least 75 cents of every dollar they take in. That is like a 25% gambling tax. It is odd that people volunteer to pay such a tax when they could gamble with each other for free.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

In the fall of 2008, stock brokers wept that billions in wealth had evaporated overnight. Stuff and nonsense! Not a penny of real wealth was lost. The factories, the land, the buildings, the work force, the farms, the trucks, the ships… were still 100% intact. They were weeping that their cons to sell people empty promises of future wealth had collapsed.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

In the USA, the insurance companies take $2 for themselves for every $1 they pass on to the doctors. Republicans and Democrats on the take from the insurance companies have convinced the American public this is a Good Thing™.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Income taxes are incredibly stressful, not so much paying them as computing them, and the fear of making a mistake. You’d think people would do them by the buddy system to either work on both sets together or to work on each other’s to reduce the tension.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

It is a national disgrace that 46 million citizens of the richest country is the world receive the same health care as those in a Darfur refugee camp — namely none.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

It is amazing how many people pretended to believe Professor Milton Friedman’s assertion that capitalism is naturally self-regulating. It is patently false. Consider:
Capitalism naturally creates an exaggerated boom and bust cycle because corporations naturally fire employees and stop spending at the first sign of a recession.

Capitalism, left to itself, reduces competition through mergers and acquisitions. Competition is the key to why capitalism works as well as it does. In the 1890 era of unregulated American capitalism, many sectors collapsed to monopolies and small oligarchies, just as oil, media, cable, agribusiness… has today, killing competition.

Consider that unregulated Chinese milk producers and American tobacco companies, when unregulated, went so far as to deliberately kill off their customers in the pursuit of increased profit.

In pursuit of profit, unregulated corporations successfully reduce wages below subsistence. This is below the value of food and shelter given to slaves or livestock.

Because corporations are unaware of the value of waste, they pollute rather than recycle, because they imagine doing so is more profitable.

Consider how unregulated American financial institutions managed to pull the entire world economy into a black hole through deliberately bad investments.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

It is bad enough having to pay income tax, but forcing people to compute the tax or pay somebody to compute it is the real pain. It is time to give taxpayers the option of allowing government computers access to your computerised financial records and have it come up with number that you can pay without doing any computation yourself, if you think it is fair, or dispute.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

It is far less of a thrill than you might imagine to make more money than you can spend, and far more unpleasant than you would ever imagine to lack sufficient income for rent, heat, food and dentistry.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

It is naive to expect corporations to solve world problems. Their sole legally-mandated function is to extract as much money as possible from you. It is similarly naive to expect government to solve world problems. Big government attracts the corrupt, the dishonest and those with the biggest egos. However, you do have some clout over both. You can refuse to patronise the worst misbehaving corporations and tout the best behaving ones and encourage your friends to do likewise. You can campaign for the best politicians and campaign against the worst. If you don’t fully use your tools to steer them, you fully deserve the typical mistreatment you get.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

It never seems to dawn on people that the cause of rising land prices, rising food prices and falling wages is increased population. When the population increases, planet earth does not magically expand her bounty of land, food and resources. There is less to go round for each person.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

It takes most people at least two irritating days a year to accumulate the paper and organise it to compute income tax. This amounts to roughly an additional 1% tax. Surely there is a simpler way of collecting the tax that happens as a side effect of purchasing and banking.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

It would cost $9 billion per year to educate every child on earth. That is less than 1% of what we spend on the military.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Karl Marx would be pleased. Even Bill Gates gets the same crap on his cable as the rest of us.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

M-A-C, a lipstick company has raised $128 million dollars for AIDS research by donating 100% of the retail price of a line of lipstick. Surely an entire country could do better.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Manually tracking financial information and compiling it for income tax wastes at least two days a year of everyone’s time. What a drain on national productivity!
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Military spending to stimulate the economy works about as well as taking in each others’ laundry. Unlike other forms of spending, it produces no new wealth.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Money is a way of convincing people to accept less than their fair share without complaining.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Money is like blood. It does little good pooling in a few organs; it has to circulate throughout the entire body.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

No other communal animal but man has a social structure that directs a slice of the resource pie 10,000+ times bigger than usual to each pack leader.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Note how commericials are almost always either deceptive, dissembling or outright lies. Think what these corporations would try without any regulation at all.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

One of the least attractive features of money is it lets a cretin like George W. Bush become the caretaker of a Cézanne or a Monet.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

One of the odd things about a recession, is that the total amount of money in all the bank accounts is the same as before the recession started. If governments print money to restart the economy, there is even more!
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

One way of looking at the Israeli-Palestinian problem is as an huge real estate fraud, far bigger than any of Bernie Madoff’s schemes. In 1948, the Jews forged God’s signature to a deed to Palestine, then proceeeded to push the Palestians off their property they had occupied for centuries.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

One way to judge a society is to ignore the money. Just look at what the people are doing through the eyes of a child. Are they sitting around doing nothing? teaching? learning? repairing? building luxury homes and yachts? sitting in fancy offices talking on the phone? overeating? growing food? rebuilding forests? killing people? healing people? shuffling papers?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Other individuals have no right to do things that harm my health. Why should corporations be permitted to get away with it?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Our ancestors created corporations to produce wealth for mankind. They have since waxed so powerful that instead of serving mankind, mankind serves them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Percentage of the word’s population comprised of Americans: 5%.
Percentage of the world’s resources consumed by Americans: 30%.
America has military bases in 38 foreign countries.
That pattern sounds familiar. Ancient Rome “persuaded” its conquered territories to send it tribute to allow it to bask in fabled luxury. Americans, like Romans, imagine this tribute comes purely as homage to their unique wonderfulness.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Psychology tells us that someone living on $300.00 USD a month will appreciate $100.00 USD a lot more than a capitalist making $30,000.00 USD a month. Even doubling the capitalist’s income has almost no effect on his happiness or well-being. Yet capitalism tells us that is far more important for a society to see that the capitalist gets the $100.00 USD .
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Recall France in 1789. The elites had become outrageously rich and decadent. They competed to waste with the greatest imagination and extravagance. Bit by bit, they had ground the people into such poverty that they could not even afford bread. Suddenly something snapped. Rivers of blood flowed and nearly every noble or member of the elite was guillotined. Mathematicians model such events with catastrophe theory. It amounts to this. When you push people too far, something snaps, and they will not back off, even when you stop oppressing them. Today, elite Americans are snatching bread from the mouths of the world’s poor to feed it to their SUVs and Hummers, fermented as ethanol. I think they are pushing it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Religions tend to focus on petty thou shalt nots. This allows believers to ignore the two big issues of morality — what do you do with your time, and what you do you do with your wealth to contribute to your planet?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Republicans favour legislation to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. I wonder if any of them have ever visited Latin American so they could see where such a policy leads.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Right wingers like to rail against the lack of initiative in the poor, yet they tax those on welfare at over 100%. If a welfare recipient manages $100 in sales with a small home business, they get $100 deducted from their dole. Since they cannot deduct any business expenses, they always lose money! I asked a local politician why this disincentive, he said almost nobody on welfare attempts to run a business, so it doesn’t matter. With the game so rigged against them, no wonder!
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Roughly 1/6 of the people on earth live on less than a dollar a day. Roughly 1/3 live on less than two dollars a day. This was not always so. This would not happen if we in the west did not take unfair advantage of those in the third world. We exploit the third world primarily by propping up (aka bribing) dictators who are friendly to western businesses, but do nothing for their own people.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Society works because most people contribute more than they take. Republicans find this infuriating. They believe the wealthy should be exempt.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Teabaggers claim lower taxes will bring more freedom. Each family’s share of the US national debt is about $170,000. If you had that much credit card debt, reducing your payments would hardly be the road to financial freedom.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The American economy is much more vulnerable than anyone will admit publicly. Consider that America has borrowed trillions to finance deficits for two lengthy wars, homeland security and a major bank bailout. Consider that the free ride its currency enjoyed as the global petrodollar is coming to an end. Consider that US corporations have outsourced nearly all manufacturing jobs, and are working hard on exporting the remainder. Consider that corrupt politicians on both sides of the aisle are working hard to bankrupt its citizens with exploding health care costs. Consider that there is no new regulation to prevent a repeat of the banking collapse that triggered the current recession. The price of gold has climbed to new heights which reflects a lack of confidence in the US dollar. The US now has two technologically and economically robust competitors: China and the European Union. Much like the British in the sunset of the empire, out of patriotic blindness, Americans love to pretend that nothing has changed and the USA is still the one and only superpower.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The average advertisement is almost completely deception, including misleading wording (lose up to 40 pounds, guaranteed!, if you order in the next 5 minutes, this $200 value free with your order, best fuel efficiency in its class) and silly claims, e.g. chewing a certain brand of gum will cause women to stick to me like magnets or that chopping vegetables with Vince’s Slap Chop will cure my depression and make me lose weight. At best these advertisement could result in a single sale. If ever an advertiser pulls one over on me, I never buy from that company again. Such a one-shot advertisement must have an extremely high cost per sale. It could even be less profitable than no advertisement at all. An honest ad that directs me to a product I truly need, and leads me to appreciate its unique charms is far more likely to result in repeat sales.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The best way to stimulate the economy is to give the money to the people hurt most — namely those who have lost their jobs. They will use it to buy groceries, make their car and mortgage payments and get their kids teeth fixed. If you give it to the fat cats, they will just spend it on foreign luxuries or sock it away in Swiss bank accounts.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The biggest problem with capitalism is not that it creates a monumental wealth divide, but that it rushes to satisfy any human desire, no matter how trivial, short sighted or destructive.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The desire for money is the desire to take more than your fair share of the pie. In our hunter gather days, such people were chastised as pigs.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The essence of the Republican policy is to help the wealthiest 1% exploit the rest of us. The only way they can get more than 1% of the vote comes from wishful thinking — the belief that real soon now™ I’ll be in the top 1%.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The important fact in the health care debate is that you spend 50% of your lifetime healthcare budget in your last year of life. Possible savings include:
No more Hail Mary, painful, expensive procedures that can only hope to extend life by a few months.

No more pushing terminal patients into treatments they don’t want.

Many levels of care so that people can live as independently as possible as long as possible.

Legalise physician-assisted suicide with safeguards to prevent pressuring either way.

Research into nursing care technology — machines to keep the bed comfortable and clean, help patients into the bath or to their feet, help patients dress and undress, deliver medications on time…
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The key to capitalism is competition. Americans worship at the state church of capitalism, yet they refuse to lift a finger to stop corporations from eliminating competition with mergers, acquisitions and lobbying congress for sweetheart laws and no-bid-contracts.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The least efficient way to stimulate the economy is with military spending. Why?
When you are done you have nothing to show for it, no highways, schools, education, sewers or airports that help support business.

The spending usually happens on the other side of the world. The spinoffs flow there, not back home.

Military spending is a high profit business. This means most of the money ends up in the pockets of a very few, very rich people. Other forms of spending spread the money around more evenly.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The magic that makes capitalism work is competition. According to Axelrod, with less than 26 competitors, you get co-operation and de facto price fixing. Corporations naturally seek to increase profit by reducing competition through mergers and acquisitions. Left to itself, capitalism collapses into an oligarchy or monopoly, which then tries to convince everyone not to interfere with the impaired “free market forces”. If you value free market capitalism, you must necessarily support regulation to preserve competition.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The main thing I noticed when I visited a casino was the pervading air of boredom. People considered it onerous drudgery to poke the coins into the slot machines. This was the last thing I expected after seeing casinos depicted in James Bond films.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The most cheerful thought to someone with HIV is that Big Pharma has a vested financial interest in keeping them alive. The most depressing is if someone ever marketed a cure for HIV, it would destroy the immensely profitable HIV drug industry. Big Pharma would fight it tooth and nail.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The new vaccine H1N1 vaccine is temporarily in short supply. Who should get it? the people most at risk for the disease or the people with the most money. The answer to this question neatly divides the population into two warring values camps.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The only multi-level marketing scheme where nearly everyone who signs up makes money is selling drugs.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The purpose of accumulating wealth is to make others do things they don’t want to do either because they are onerous or because they are unwise. The lust for money is primarily the desire to enslave others.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The relationship of America to the rest of the world is similar to the relationship of ancient Rome to its provinces. From Rome’s point of view, the purpose of the provinces was to provide goods and services to the people of Rome. Rome was prepared to use any means necessary to transfer wealth/capital from the provinces to Rome. Like ancient Rome, the USA is a parasite. With only 1/20th of the planet’s population, America consumes the lion’s share of the global production. It vainly imagines itself to be magnanimous, yet it is actually the stingiest of all the developed nations. It’s wealth comes from deliberately grinding other countries into poverty.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The Rich Get Richer
In the first seven years of the George W. Bush’s administration, the 400 richest Americans each increased their wealth an average of 1.5 billion dollars. The income over that period of the average American decreased by $28,000.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)
The funny thing is, there are people who, even when faced with this reality, still insist on the validity of the trickle down theory of helping the poor by giving money to the rich.

The rich imagine themselves great benefactors, but the truth is, when the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. A preposterous share of the planetary labour is diverted to the care, feeding, protection and entertainment of the wealthy, so it could hardly be otherwise.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The United States, even when it is reeling with trillion dollar deficits still manages to give Israel $4 billion a year. Israel is a relatively wealthy country running surpluses. Such a relationship in the animal world where one creature is induced to sacrifice itself for the benefit of a stranger is called parasitism.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

The United States, gives $4 billion a year to Israel to run an apartheid system. The supreme court would not let them spend that money on apartheid in the USA, so why does it let them spend it in Israel?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

There are 300 channels on my TV, most of them broadcasting trash. The best are PBS and KNOW, the BC government education channel. The problem is “free” programming means advertiser-sponsored programming. That means the shows are just filler between the ads. The producer would never dare say anything offensive to the advertisers. To move the producer’s loyalty to the viewer, we viewers will have to pay, not that much, just as much the advertiser paid to torment us.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

There are two ways another country could defeat the United States. One of them is wait for the USA to bankrupt itself with deficit spending and buy the country at the bankruptcy auction.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

There is nothing more overrated than having more than enough money and nothing so underrated as having your back scratched.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Trying to head off a depression with massive tax cuts is inefficient because:
The poor spend their windfall at Wal-Mart, stimulating the Chinese economy, but doing nothing for the North American.

The middle class save their windfall. What else would they do on seeing their retirement savings and home equity evaporate and continued employment insecure?

The wealthy invest their windfall in parts of the world where commerce is still bubbling along happily.
It would be better to target efforts on creating and sustaining jobs.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Unlike humans, no wolf would tolerate a pack leader who took 10,000+ times as big a share as the other pack members.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

We forget that, first and foremost, a corporation is a group of people: management, staff and stockholders. It should have no special privilege above other groups of that same size. We get so used to thinking of corporate size in terms of dollars, we start to think they deserve civil rights in proportion to wealth rather than population.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

We imagine that we have a free Internet, but really we have an advertiser-sponsored Internet. If we want quality, we will have to pay, not much, just more than the advertisers were willing to pay to annoy us.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Well poisoning in times past was the ultimate crime. Today doing it on a massive scale is standard business practice.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

What sank the Soviet Union? Spending more money than they had on the military. They simply went broke. The USA is doing the same thing to itself, without even a credible enemy pushing them into it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

When a life necessity is in short supply, a government can either ration it or let its price rise. Rationing gives everyone a basic allotment, however it encourages people to take their full ration whether they need it or not. If incomes vary widely, letting the price rise freezes out the poor while the wealthy deliberately waste the commodity in a display of conspicuous consumption. I suspect a patriotic appeal for conservation with public shaming of wastrels might work better than either rationing or price rises.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

When a right winger talks about freedom he means that governments should not interfere in any way with the activities of corporations or wealthy individuals. Corporations should be free to use their wealth and power even to exploit those without power. Instead of freedom, I would call this laissez faire capitalism. The sort of freedom I want for myself is freedom from bullying by governments, corporations and wealthy individuals. I want the government to limit the power of those institutions to run roughshod over me.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

When Americans support competition, they mean allowing corporations to compete unfettered for the greatest dishonesty, forcing the honest corporations that give fair value out of business.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

When an average man gets in over his head financially, the banks raise the interest on his credit cards to 40%. When a bank gets in over its head, the government bails it out with a no-interest loan or an outright handout. In America, it is sink-or-swim cutthroat capitalism for the average man and socialism for the bankers.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

When you have a large imbalance of power, the strong take advantage of the weak. Republicans would have us believe this is not so in the case of corporations in their relations with their customers.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

When you were a kid, you took three hours of physical education a week. You walked or rode your bike to and from school. You probably played various sports. Why would you expect better results now as an adult from an exercise program advertised on TV that takes only three ten minute sessions per week?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

You can count the number of privileged elite who went to bat for the common man on one hand. There is no need to coddle the aristocracy for the common good.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

You have a power over corporations, similar to your power of the vote over government. Simply refuse ever after to buy anything from corporations that misbehave, cheat you or lie to you. If enough people do this, those corporations will go out of business. At the very least, you hurt their profitability. Corporations have no moral compass. They do what makes the most money. Make sure that behaving responsibly is the only way to get your money. Then let the corporations know why you are boycotting them. Even when they give you the brush off, they still pay extra attention to such letters.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

You’d think the defence industry would have a strong incentive to keep America afloat. Without a country they would have nothing to do and no source of income. However, corporations take a short term view. So long as they can make more profit today, they don’t care if their customers go bankrupt tomorrow. They will happily lobby, bribe and threaten legislators to overspend and spend unwisely. They will also twist the legislators’ arms to initiate endless, pointless wars, simply because wars mean more profit.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

You’d think the Republicans who hold up their arms in the sign of the cross at the mention of a government health care option would refuse on principle to use other socialist institutions such as firemen, police, libraries, national parks, roads, air traffic control, 911, medicare, community centers, garbage collection, water, snow removal…
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.
~ Theodore Roosevelt (born: 1858-10-27 died: 1919-01-06 at age: 60)

I don’t pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being.
~ Theodore Roosevelt (born: 1858-10-27 died: 1919-01-06 at age: 60)

We have socialised loss and privatised gain.
~ Eliot Spitzer (born: 1959-06-10 age: 50), former Governor of New York.

The desire for gold is the desire to make others do what they do not want to do.
~ Emile de Tocqueville

We have the best government that money can buy.
~ Mark Twain (born: 1835-11-30 died: 1910-04-21 at age: 74)

Invention is the mother of necessity.
~ Thorstein Veblen (born: 1857-07-30 died: 1929-08-03 at age: 72)
The capitalist version of the old saw.

It is always sound business to take any obtainable net gain, at any cost and at any risk to the rest of the community.
~ Thorstein Veblen (born: 1857-07-30 died: 1929-08-03 at age: 72)

Another of our agreed-upon fantasies is that we do not have a class system in the United States. The Few who control the Many through Opinion have simply made themselves invisible. They have convinced us that we are a classless society in which everyone can make it.
~ Gore Vidal (born: 1925-10-03 age: 84)

Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won’t be. Any individual who is able to raise $25 million [inflated to $1 billion in 2008] to be considered presidential is not going to be much use to the people at large. He will represent oil, or aerospace, or banking, or whatever moneyed entities are paying for him. Certainly he will never represent the people of the country, and they know it. Hence, the sense of despair throughout the land as incomes fall, businesses fail and there is no redress.
~ Gore Vidal (born: 1925-10-03 age: 84)

On 1985-09-16, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.
~ Gore Vidal (born: 1925-10-03 age: 84)

Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
~ Gore Vidal (born: 1925-10-03 age: 84)

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity — much less dissent.
~ Gore Vidal (born: 1925-10-03 age: 84)

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.
~ Gore Vidal (born: 1925-10-03 age: 84)

There is nothing to which men cling more tenaciously than the privileges of class.
~ Leonard Sidney Woolf (born: 1880-11-25 died: 1969-08-14 at age: 88)

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