#capitalism

A term like capitalism is incredibly slippery, because there's such a range of different kinds of market economies. Essentially, what we've been debating over—certainly since the Great Depression—is what percentage of a society should be left in the hands of a deregulated market system. And absolutely there are people that are at the far other end of the spectrum that want to communalize all property and abolish private property, but in general the debate is not between capitalism and not capitalism, it's between what parts of the economy are not suitable to being decided by the profit motive. And I guess that comes from being Canadian, in a way, because we have more parts of our society that we've made a social contract to say, 'That's not a good place to have the profit motive govern.' Whereas in the United States, that idea is kind of absent from the discussion. So even something like firefighting—it seems hard for people make an argument that maybe the profit motive isn't something we want in the firefighting sector, because you don't want a market for fire. ↗

— Naomi Klein

#motivational

And one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?" And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. ↗

— Martin Luther King Jr.

#economics #justice #economy

The same rightists who decades ago were shouting, 'Better dead than red!' are now often heard mumbling, 'Better red than eating hamburgers. ↗

— Slavoj Žižek

#capitalism #communism #conservatives #hamburgers #marxism

Liberal democracy - as you know, in the old days, we were saying we want socialism with a human face. Today's left effectively offers global capitalism with a human face, more tolerance, more rights and so on. So the question is, is this enough or not? Here I remain a Marxist: I think not. ↗

— Slavoj Zizek

#days #democracy #effectively #enough #face

When it comes to rapacious 19th century capitalism, my family's hands are clean. ↗

— Calvin Trillin

#capitalism #century #clean #comes #family

Everything that everyone is afraid of has already happened: The fragility of capitalism, which we don't want to admit; the loss of the empire of the United States; and American exceptionalism. In fact, American exceptionalism is that we are exceptionally backward in about fifteen different categories, from education to infrastructure. ↗

— James Hillman

#admit #afraid #already #american #backward

We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values. ↗

— Tony Benn

#change #define #finer #here #just

Right now people seem to be very tentative about the positive benefits of capitalism. ↗

— Jeb Bush

#benefits #capitalism #now #people #positive

I have said it already, I am convinced that the way to build a new and better world is not capitalism. Capitalism leads us straight to hell. ↗

— Hugo Chavez

#am #better #better world #build #capitalism

The left is back, and it's the only path we have to get out of the spot to which the right has sunken us. Socialism builds and capitalism destroys. ↗

— Hugo Chavez

#builds #capitalism #destroys #get #left