Quotes About Capitalist Economy

#1. A thriving middle class is the source of growth in a technological, capitalist economy. Investing in the middle class is the most pro-business thing you can do.

Nick Hanauer

#2. The British welfare state, it seemed, had removed the incentives without which a capitalist economy simply could not function: the carrot of serious money for those who strove, the stick of hardship for those who slacked.

Niall Ferguson

#3. A genuine Left doesn't consider anyone's suffering irrelevant or titillating; nor does it function as a microcosm of capitalist economy, with men competing for power and status at the top, and women doing all the work at the bottom ... Goodbye to all that.

Robin Morgan

#4. The key thing about wealth in a capitalist economy is that it reproduces itself and usually earns a positive net return.

Robert Solow

#5. Capitalism is too important and complex a subject to be left to economists. Achieving a critical comprehension of it requires perspectives beyond those characteristic of modern economics. That is why this is a history not of economic ideas, but of ideas beyond the capitalist economy.

Jerry Z. Muller

#6. The crucial role of the rich in a capitalist economy is ... to invest; to provide unencumbered and unbureaucratized cash.

George Gilder

#7. A capitalist economy hums when leading businessmen are bubbling with animal spirits and are prepared to sink their money into risky ventures.

Paul Johnson

#8. The desire for an increase of wealth can be satisfied through exchange, which is the only method possible in a capitalist economy, or by violence and petition as in a militarist society, where the strong acquire by force, the weak by petitioning.

Ludwig Von Mises

#9. No economic activity was more irrepressible [in the 14th century] than the investment and lending at interest of money; it was the basis for the rise of the Western capitalist economy and the building of private fortunes-and it was based on the sin of usury.

Barbara Tuchman

#10. [ ... ] in a predatory capitalist economy, state intervention would be an absolute necessity to preserve human existence and to prevent the destruction of the physical environment [ ... ].

Noam Chomsky

#11. What both the state and the capitalist economy oppose is an understanding of what might be called "the true nature of things" (using the phrase without metaphysical pretensions), especially injustices and exploitative practices.

Richard A. Falk

#12. My claim is that we do not have a market economy, but a capitalist economy.

David Korten

#13. In every capitalist economy there are anti-capitalist movements, activists, and even political parties; in a way, that there are no longer anti-democratic movements, activists, and parties.

Geoff Mulgan

#14. Workers do not strike every day, they cannot do that the way they function in the capitalist economy. The way they have to live by selling their labor power makes that impossible.

Ernest Mandel

#15. This transformation of competition into monopoly is one of the most important - if not the most important - phenomena of modern capitalist economy,

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

#16. Manufacturing and commercial monopolies owe their origin not to a tendency imminent in a capitalist economy but to governmental interventionist policy directed against free trade and laissez faire.

Ludwig Von Mises

#17. Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college.

Noam Chomsky

#18. No company has a permanent consumer franchise. No one has the only game in town. The never-ending cycle of destruction and change inherent in a capitalist economy always provides new opportunities for those with determination, goals and concentration.

Harvey MacKay

#19. We live in an industrial world with a globalized capitalist economy organized politically around nation-states. Finding a willing audience for even a mild critique of any of these foundational systems is not easy; suggesting that all three systems should be rethought in fundamental ways seems crazy.

Robert Jensen

#20. There cannot exist in the future an economy which is still mercantile but which isn't capitalist anymore. Before capitalism there were economies which were partially mercantile, but capitalism is the last of this genre.

Amadeo Bordiga

#21. I became a Communist by studying capitalist political economy, and when I had some understanding of that problem, it actually seemed to me so absurd, so irrational, so inhuman, that I simply began to elaborate on my own formulas for production and distribution.

Fidel Castro

#22. Children are being adultified because our economy is depending on them to make purchasing decisions. So they're essentially the victims of a marketing and capitalist machine gone awry.

Douglas Rushkoff

#23. It is not socialist, as some of our critics contend. It isn't purely capitalist, either. It is a new way. A third way. A more humane, trusting, productive, exhilarating, and, in every sense, rewarding way.

Ricardo Semler

#24. Every year the progress of advanced capitalist society makes our population consist of more and more isolates. This is because of the infrastructure of the economy, especially electronic communications.

Mary Douglas

#25. The barriers that renewables and efficiency face come less from our living in a capitalist market economy and more from not taking market economics seriously.

Amory Lovins

#26. Structuralism argues that a liberal capitalist world economy tends to preserve or actually increase inequalities between developed and less developed economies.

Robert Gilpin

#27. It is indeed paradoxical that, while the apologists of capitalism usually consider the 'price mechanism' to be the great advantage of the capitalist system, price flexibility proves to be a characteristic feature of the socialist economy.

Michal Kalecki

#28. The very concept of universal formal education is a product (and a relatively late product) of the capitalist world-economy.

Immanuel Wallerstein

#29. The capitalist system is not delivering those decade-after-decade increases it promised. We're not where we should be in terms of our national economies. We don't know how to get out of this malaise and I think we now have to consider more radical policies.

Adair Turner

#30. There is a patent conflict between the need to reverse or at least to control the impact of our economy on the biosphere and the imperatives of a capitalist market: maximum continuing growth in the search for profit.

Eric Hobsbawm

#31. Apart from their work and production, households perform other important economic functions. Most CONSUMPTION occurs within the household ... In developed capitalist economies, private consumption spending accounts for half or more of GDP.

Jim Stanford

#32. I rather wish to rest my case on material considerations, not those of the social future but those of the actual historical period of the capitalist world-economy.

Immanuel Wallerstein

#33. We want a system in which the worker shall get what he produces and the capitalist shall produce what he gets.

Eugene V. Debs

#34. "Freedom" in capitalist countries exists only for those who possess money and who consequently hold power.

Nikita Khrushchev