Consumers Quotes

A strong currency means that American consumers and businesses can buy imported goods and services more cheaply and that inflation and interest rates will be lower, ... It also puts pressure on American industry to increase productivity and competitiveness. These benefits can feed on themselves as foreign capital flows in more readily because of greater confidence in our currency. A weak dollar would have the contrary effects. ~ Robert Rubin

Take one famous example: arguments about property destruction after Seattle. Most of these, I think, were really arguments about capitalism. Those who decried window-breaking did so mainly because they wished to appeal to middle-class consumers to move towards global exchange-style green consumerism, and to ally with labor bureaucracies and social democrats abroad. This was not a path designed to provoke a direct confrontation with capitalism, and most of those who urged us to take this route were at least skeptical about the possibility that capitalism could ever really be defeated. Many were in fact in favor of capitalism, if in a significantly humanized form. Those who did break windows, on the other hand, didn't care if they offended suburban homeowners, because they did not figure that suburban homeowners were likely to ever become a significant element in any future revolutionary anticapitalist coalition. They were trying, in effect, to hijack the media to send a message that the system was vulnerable -- hoping to inspire similar insurrectionary acts on the part of those who might be considering entering a genuinely revolutionary alliance; alienated teenagers, oppressed people of color, undocumented workers, rank-and-file laborers impatient with union bureaucrats, the homeless, the unemployed, the criminalized, the radically discontent. If a militant anticapitalist movement was to begin, in America, it would have to start with people like these: people who don't need to ~ David Graeber

Any outcome, any deal that doesn't preserve the freedom and openness of the internet for consumers and entrepreneurs will be unacceptable. ~ Julius Genachowski

When we fail to open the closed-minded consumers of racist ideas, we blame their closed-mindedness instead of our foolish decision to waste time reviving closed minds from the dead. When our vicious attacks on open-minded consumers of racist ideas fail to transform them, we blame their hate rather than our impatient and alienating hate of them. When people fail to consume our convoluted antiracist ideas, we blame their stupidity rather than our stupid lack of clarity. When we transform people and do not show them an avenue of support, we blame their lack of commitment rather than our lack of guidance. When the politician we supported does not change racist policy, we blame the intractability of racism rather than our support of the wrong politician. When we fail to gain support for a protest, we blame the fearful rather than our alienating presentation. When the protest fails, we blame racist power rather than our flawed protest. When our policy does not produce racial equity, we blame the people for not taking advantage of the new opportunity, not our flawed policy solution. The failure doctrine avoids the mirror of self-blame. The failure doctrine begets failure. The failure doctrine begets racism. ~ Ibram X. Kendi

For-profit weather forecasters rarely predict exactly a 50 percent chance of rain, which might seem wishy-washy and indecisive to consumers.41 Instead, they'll flip a coin and round up to 60, or down to 40, even though this makes the forecasts both less accurate and ~ Nate Silver

Cars, toys, aspirin, meat, toasters, water - nearly every product sold has passed basic safety regulations well in advance of being marketed and sold. But consumer credit is a kind of buyer-beware, wild west. That is partly the result of history. ~ Elizabeth Warren

Most consumers are simultaneously neophilic, curious to discover new things, and deeply neophobic, afraid of anything that is too new. The best hit makers are gifted at creating moments of meaning by marrying new and old, anxiety and understanding. They are architects of familiar surprises. ~ Derek Thompson

I actually think that the economy has got some positives. It's got the market. It's got consumer confidence and it's got banks throwing - I mean central bankers throwing money at it around the world. ~ Jack Welch

On the whole it may be observed, that the specific use of a body of unproductive consumers, is to give encouragement to wealth by maintaining such a balance between produce and consumption as will give the greatest exchangeable value to the results of the national industry. ~ Thomas Malthus

You can do more with 12 disciples than with 1,200 religious consumers. ~ Alan Hirsch

The most impactful way consumers can assert their power is to become mindful shoppers, giving their dollars only to socially responsible companies. In today's world of social media and smart phones, this is easy to do. ~ Simon Mainwaring

It's certainly sobering to think that British consumers waste roughly a quarter of the food we buy. Or to put it another way, we funnel £12 billion a year from the supermarket through to our rubbish tips, costing each household an average of £480. ~ Tristram Stuart

All over the world copyright holders are trying to limit consumers' rights. We cannot have that. ~ Jon Johansen

America must be the teacher of democracy, not the advertiser of the consumer society. It is unrealistic for the rest of the world to reach the American living standard. ~ Mikhail Gorbachev

The commercial media … help citizens feel as if they are successful and have met these aspirations, even if they have not. They tend to neglect reality (they don't run stories about how life is hard, fame and fortune elusive, hopes disappointed) and instead celebrate idealized identities – those that, in a commodity culture, revolve around the acquisition of status, money, fame and power, or at least the illusion of these things. The media, in other words, assist the commercial culture in "need creation", prompting consumers to want things they don't need or have never really considered wanting. And catering to these needs, largely implanted by advertisers and the corporate culture, is a very profitable business. A major part of the commercial media revolves around selling consumers images and techniques to "actualize" themselves, or offering seductive forms of escape through entertainment and spectacle. News is filtered into the mix, but actual news is not the predominant concern of the commercial media. ~ Chris Hedges

Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a "disposable" culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society's underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised - they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the "exploited" but the outcast, the "leftovers". ~ Pope Francis

Perhaps the grumbler will object on the ground that he considers p a vital commodity, much more important than q, and that therefore the production of p should be expanded and that of q restricted. If this is really the meaning of his criticism, he is at variance with the valuations of the consumers. He throws off his mask and shows his dictatorial aspirations. Production should not be directed by the wishes of the public but by his own despotic discretion. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

consumers are not a piece of code. You can't just query them into action. ~ Laura Busche

There is now more pressure on consumers than there has ever been and it is not sustainable. ~ Betty Furness

Even though some individual scholars try to tell us there is no direct connection between images of violence and the violence confronting us in our lives, the commonsense truth remains- we are affected by the images we consume and by the states of mind we are in when watching them. If consumers want to be entertained, and the images shown us as entertaining are images of violent dehumanization, it makes sense that these acts become more acceptable in our daily lives and that we become less likely to respond to them with moral outrage or concern. Were we all seeing more images of loving human interaction, it would undoubtedly have a positive impact on our lives. ~ Bell Hooks

monopsony: a single buyer, who may harm suppliers in the short term but also consumers in the long term, as they suffer from diminished choice and reduced competition. ~ Anonymous

Recession-resistant development produces things people need. Unsustainable growth churns out tinsel products that consumers have to be seduced into buying - until times get tough, when they quickly give them up. ~ Donella Meadows

The money economy thus leaves a large ecological footprint, defined as the amount of land and resources required to meet a typical consumer's needs. For example, with only about 4% of the world's population, the United States, the largest money economy, consumes in excess of one-quarter of the world's energy and materials and generates in excess of 25 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. ~ Stuart L. Hart

Mangrove destruction is not only an ecological threat to a valuable ecosystem but also a social threat for [the poor]. External debt pressure on exporting countries, neo-liberal doctrines and ecological blindness of northern importing consumers, together with a flagrant lack of local governmental action to protect the environment in most shrimp-producer countries, are the main driving forces of mangrove destruction. ~ Joan Martinez-Alier

The novel has always been a contradictory form. Here is a long form narrative mainly read originally by consumers who were only newly literate or limited in their literacy. The novel ranked below poetry, essay and history in prestige for a long time. ~ Matthew Pearl

We could have a greener economy, even a greener consumer economy by changing the rules - whether it's by taxing carbon or trading carbon, I'm not sure what - but in the end there's just a fundamental problem with the sheer amount we're consuming. ~ Michael Pollan

When consumers tried to improve their health by shifting to skim milk, Congress set up a scheme for the powerful dairy industry through which it has quietly turned all that unwanted, surplus fat into huge sales of cheese - not cheese to be eaten before or after dinner as a delicacy, but cheese that is slipped into our food as an alluring but unnecessary extra ingredient. The toll, thirty years later: The average American now consumes as much as thirty-three pounds of cheese a year. ~ Michael Moss

I also saw a huge expansion of the Internet, with many major corporations, afraid of being left behind, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop World Wide Web sites in a frantic scramble to reach the vast new consumer market of Web use ~ Dave Barry

Consumers will tell you important stuff that you need to know if you shut up and listen. ~ Jeffrey Slater

Most best-sellers are written for readers who are willing to be passive consumers. The blurbs on their covers often highlight the coercive, aggressive power of the text - compulsive page-turner, gut-wrenching, jolting, mind-searing, heart-stopping - what is this, electroshock torture? ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

So, at the end of the day, humor works by distracting a person long enough to lower his resistance to the new information and then makes a positive association with the person/brand/computer screen that provided that humor to him. The reality is that people want to be entertained more than they want to be educated. Brand owners have gotten wise to this and now connect with consumers by providing information in an entertaining manner. It's what the ad agency world has dubbed "infotainment." The new school of business teaches that if you do not deliver your information via infotainment, you lose out to those who do. ~ Marshall Chiles

In recent years, more and more businesses are shifting from the pipeline structure to the platform structure. In this shift, the simple pipeline arrangement is transformed into a complex relationship in which producers, consumers, and the platform itself enter into a variable set of relationships. ~ Geoffrey G. Parker

Rather than simply interrupting a television show with a commercial or barging into the consumer's life with an unannounced phone call or letter, tomorrow's marketer will first try to gain the consumer's consent to participate in the selling process. ~ Seth

We're getting to the point where it's important for each platform to have unique, differentiated titles
so that if consumers want to buy that game, they have to buy that system ~ John Taylor

States used to protect consumers from predatory lenders, but strong state usury laws were obliterated by a 1978 U.S. Supreme Court decision. ~ Bernie Sanders

The riches of the rich are not the cause of the poverty of anybody; the process that makes some people rich is, on the contrary, the corollary of the process that improves many peoples want satisfaction. The entrepreneurs, the capitalists and the technologists prosper as far as they succeed in best supplying the consumers. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Instead of engaging in cutthroat competition, we should strive to create value. In economic terms, this means a transition from a consumer economy - the mad rush for ownership and consumption - to a constructive economy where all human beings can participate in the act of creating lasting worth. ~ Daisaku Ikeda

Why do eight out of ten new consumer products fail? Sometimes because they are too new. The first cold cereals were rejected by consumers. More often new products fail because they are not new enough. ~ David Ogilvy

Weight loss programs and health clubs have an ethical and legal obligation to adequately disclose details about program costs before customers sign a contract. They should also clearly explain how the program works and what is expected so that consumers can make an informed choice whether to join. ~ Bill Vaughan

I truly believe the American consumer doesn't want to buy products made under abusive conditions. ~ Phil Knight

Wardrobing is buying an item of clothing, wearing it for a while, and then returning it in such a state that the store has to accept it but can no longer resell it. By engaging in wardrobing, consumers are not directly stealing money from the company; instead, it is a dance of buying and returning, with many unclear transactions involved. But there is at least one clear consequence - the clothing industry estimates that its annual losses from wardrobing are about $16 billion (about the same amount as the estimated annual loss from home burglaries and automobile theft combined). ~ Dan Ariely

More customers for Canadian oil means that Canadian producers can charge more for their oil, which then means that American businesses and consumers will pay more for oil. ~ Ron Wyden

Government interference with the economic process represents a substitution of political for consumer objectives. ~ Sheldon Richman

True utility happens in the moment of need. Not the brand's moment of need, but the consumer's moment of need. If you can meet that need when the customer needs it met, you are on to something big. ~ Mitch Joel

Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy. ~ Christopher Lasch

But a tax on luxuries would no other effect than to raise their price. It would fall wholly on the consumer, and could neither increase wages nor lower profits. ~ David Ricardo

Stop competing on price; compete on value. Deliver total consumer solutions, rather than just your piece of the solution. ~ Faith Popcorn

Any time you can give consumers more of what they want, it's a good thing. Unbundling the album is a good thing. In the case of music - because it is content that you can slice into songs - doing that is of huge benefit to consumers. ~ Edgar Bronfman, Jr.

The only source from which an entrepreneurs profits stem is his ability to anticipate better than other people the future demand of the consumers. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Financial service providers act as the lubricating oil in the economy. They link consumers who want to invest their savings for a good return with companies who want to borrow on best terms for expansion. ~ John Bruton

Since man does not create physical matter, those who handle material objects in the production process are not producers in that sense. Economic benefits result from the transformation of matter in form, location, or availability (intellectually or temporally). It is these transformations that create economic benefits valued by consumers, and whoever arranges such transformations contributes to the value of things, whether his hands actually come into contact with physical objects or not. ~ Thomas Sowell

Production goes up and up because high pressure advertising and salesmanship constantly create new needs that must be satisfied: this is Admass- a consumer's race with donkeys chasing an electric carrot. ~ J.B. Priestley

The Tantric view is that there is already a complete Buddha dormant within each of us, but we've individually and collectively become addicted to horror movies that we mistake for documentaries. From this perspective, our whole society is caught up in a kind of shared horror story, imagining ourselves as zombie consumers rather than empowered citizens: afraid, insecure, incapable beings who have no choice but to wander through life grasping after fleeting pleasures, needlessly competing with each other instead of collaborating, isolating ourselves from the plight of those whose stories we don't understand. Because our whole society is both constructing and watching this shared screenplay simultaneously, the physical world begins to take on the qualities of this horror movie, and it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish the theater of our experience from the screen of our own projections. ~ Ethan Nichtern

We have power as consumers. We can exercise that power all the time by not choosing to invest time, energy or funds to support the production of mass media images that do not reflect life-enhancing values, that undermine a love ethic. ~ Bell Hooks

That is simple. In the Colonies we issue our own money. It is called Colonial Scrip. We issue it in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers. In this manner creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay. ~ Benjamin Franklin

If you've ever taken an economics course you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. I don't have to tell you, that's not what's done. If advertisers lived by market principles then some enterprise, say, General Motors, would put on a brief announcement of their products and their properties, along with comments by Consumer Reports magazine so you could make a judgment about it.

That's not what an ad for a car is - an ad for a car is a football hero, an actress, the car doing some crazy thing like going up a mountain or something. If you've ever turned on your television set, you know that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to try to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices - that's what advertising is. ~ Noam Chomsky

With less and less television being watched live, consumers are enjoying the freedom to record at home or in the cloud, watch locally or on the go, and binge watch entire series that they never had the time to enjoy. ~ Jay Samit

Resistence takes place on many planes. Occasionally it can be dramatic and public, but most of the decisions we are faced with are mundane and private. What to eat is a choice that we make several times a day, if we are lucky. The cumulative choices we make about food have profound implications. Food offers us many opportunities to resist the culture of mass marketing and commodification. Though consumer action can take many creative and powerful forms, we do not have to be reduced to the role of consumers selecting from seductive convenience items. We can merge appetite with activism and choose to involve ourselves in food as cocreators. (Page 27) ~ Sandor Ellix Katz

The paradox of Steve Jobs's career is that he had no interest in listening to consumers - he was famously dismissive of market research - yet nonetheless had an amazing sense of what consumers actually wanted. ~ James Surowiecki

Every time that an animal eats a plant or another animal, the conversion of food biomass into the consumer's biomass involves an efficiency of much less than 100 percent: typically around 10 percent. That is, it takes around 10,000 pounds of corn to grow a 1,000-pound cow. If instead you want to grow 1,000 pounds of carnivore, you have to feed it 10,000 pounds of herbivore grown on 100,000 pounds of corn. Even among herbivores and omnivores, many species, like koalas, are too finicky in their plant preferences to recommend themselves as farm animals. As a result of this fundamental inefficiency, no mammalian carnivore has ever been domesticated for food. ~ Jared Diamond

Every patient is a consumer, and every consumer is a potential patient. What NantWorks is doing is building the world the way Da Vinci saw it, and augmenting every frame a human being sees as they work, live and play. ~ Patrick Soon-Shiong

Consumers are realizing the benefits of in-car entertainment and navigation systems. When used properly, these products are great tools that help drivers focus on the road. Consumers need to remember to follow state laws, watch the road and use common sense when putting these and other products to work. ~ Gary Shapiro

The world is now awash in data and we can see consumers in a lot clearer ways. ~ Max Levchin

Market growth alone doesn't give you enough tailwind. You have to create your own. The way to do that is by designing products for consumers that wow them. ~ Indra Nooyi

Individuals can make choices about their own health treatments, but it is critical public health decisions are evidence based and that consumers have appropriate evidence based information about alternative health products. ~ Metiria Turei

I give the spectator the possibility of participating. The audience completes the film by thinking about it; those who watch must not be just consumers ingesting spoon-fed images. ~ Michael Haneke

There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years. ~ Donna Tartt

Coding is today's language of creativity. All our children deserve a chance to become creators instead consumers of computer science. ~ Maria Klawe

We need to be much more robust consumers. ~ Beeban Kidron

Stop being a consumer, fight the power! ~ Peaches Geldof

We didn't wait for the renewable heat incentives to come into place; we wanted to be first to provide consumers with alternative ways to heat their homes. ~ Martin Naughton

The pace of technological change in recent years has been both impressive and positive for consumers. ~ Mike Ferguson

I was 17 and just learning what high fidelity was, what good sound was, and learning the mechanics of tape machines. It was a real education, going right from the consumer end to the record factory. ~ Alan Parsons

Citizens may recoil from paying for the news, he noted, because they see it as a natural right. But in the absence of consumer coin, the media must be fueled by advertisers seeking consumers and investors pursuing profit. Novelty and drama pay to keep the presses rolling, and so the "news" that supposedly informs reason becomes the dog wagged by its own tail. ~ Brooke Gladstone

Look for some peace organization to join. It will look small at first, and pitiful and helpless, but that's how movements start. That's how the movement against the Vietnam War started. It started with handfuls of people who thought they were helpless, thought they were powerless. But remember, this power of the people on top depends on the obedience of the people below. When people stop obeying, they have no power. When workers go on strike, huge corporations lose their power. When consumers boycott, huge business establishments have to give in. When soldiers refuse to fight, as so many soldiers did in Vietnam, so many deserters, so many fraggings, acts of violence by enlisted men against officers in Vietnam, B-52 pilots refusing to fly bombing missions anymore, war can't go on. When enough soldiers refuse, the government has to decide we can't continue. So, yes, people have the power. If they begin to organize, if they protest, if they create a strong enough movement, they can change things. ~ Howard Zinn

Modern US consumers now get to taste less than 1 percent of the vegetable varieties that were grown here a century ago. Those old-timers now lurk only in backyard gardens and on farms that specialize in direct sales
if they survive at all. Many heirlooms have been lost entirely. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I know how tough it is to stand up to powerful forces that prey on consumers. ~ Kathleen Sebelius

We are a consumer company and our success is directly linked to our users trusting us. Therefore we have the same incentive as the user: they want to see relevant advertising so their experience of Google is positive and we want to deliver it. ~ Susan Wojcicki

Once consumers try popchips, most people really like it and become fans. ~ Keith Belling

Our personal consumer choices have ecological, social, and spiritual consequences. It is time to re-examine some of our deeply held notions that underlie our lifestyles. ~ David Suzuki

The stock market crash in October 1929 didn't destroy a particularly large amount of wealth or make people highly pessimistic. Rather, it made companies and consumers very unsure about future income, and so led them to stop spending as they waited for more information. ~ Christina Romer

American consumers benefit from disparity & exploitation. I benefit from disparity & exploitation & so does my family. there is no way to be a consumer in this country without causing pain" --casey gray - author of Discount - & my New HERO ~ Casey Gray

Comcast rents modems directly to consumers, thereby competing directly with companies like Zoom. It has every reason to make Zoom modems more expensive or even to drive companies like Zoom out of business. ~ Bernie Sanders

While big-business leaders and firms can be highly productive, servants of consumers in a free market economy, they are also all too often, seekers after subsidies, contracts, privileges, or cartels furnished by big government. Often, business lobbyists and leaders are the sparkplugs for the statist, interventionist system. ~ Murray Rothbard

As consumers and as voters we can say 'no' to rogue economics and demand regulation. ~ Loretta Napoleoni

Confronted with this double madness of the labourers killing themselves with over-production and vegetating in abstinence, the great problem of capitalist production is no longer to find producers and to multiply their powers but to discover consumers, to excite their appetites and create in them fictitious needs. ~ Paul Lafargue

There are less than 14 million Jews in the world, compared to the almost two billion Muslims who own most of the oil and natural resources. Yet if you visit any major city in the world, you will find that the best hospitals are named Mt. Sinai, Cedars Sinai, or Albert Einstein because they are hospitals built by donations from Jews for the good of the people. If you go to any major university, you will see how many of the major donors and scholarship providers are Jews. The Jewish people are more likely to give as much they can to charities, and at the same time will be the most value-conscious consumers. ~ Celso Cukierkorn

Our chemical and other manufacturing concerns are all too often ready to let the Germans have Latin American markets, provided the American companies can work out an arrangement which will enable them to charge high prices to the consumer inside the United States. ~ Henry A. Wallace

You look at, like, a 'People' magazine, which used to be a really good, you know, nice magazine you could go to for real stories. It wasn't like a 'Star' or an 'US Weekly' and they have somebody with plastic surgery on the cover, Heidi Montag. And it's obviously what consumers want, because why else would they be doing it? ~ Chelsea Handler

In the wine world, crusaders would have wine consumers believe that the only wines of merit are something completely indefinable but which they call 'authentic' or 'natural.' ~ Robert M. Parker, Jr.

The Spy Act strikes a right balance between preserving legitimate and benign uses of this technology, while still, at the same time, protecting unwitting consumers from the harm caused when it is misused and, of course, designed for nefarious purposes. ~ Cliff Stearns

Why is it that medical strictures and recommendations so often work in favor of food processors and against food producers? Why, for example, do we so strongly favor the pasteurization of milk to health and cleanliness in milk production? (Gene Logsdon correctly says that the motive here "is monopoly, not consumer's health.") ~ Wendell Berry

NO reader has ANY obligation to an author, whether it be to leave a review or to write a "constructive" one. I put out a product. You are consumers of that product. Since when does that mean you have to kiss my ass? Hey, I like Pop-Tarts and eat them a few times a year; since when does that mean I'm obligated to support Kellogg's in any way except legally purchasing the Pop-Tarts before I eat them? I wasn't aware that purchasing and consuming a product meant I was under some sort of fucking thrall in which I'm only allowed to either praise the Pop-Tart (which to be honest isn't hard, especially the S'mores flavor) or, if I am going to criticize a flavor, offer a specific and detailed analysis as to why, phrased in as inoffensive and gentle a manner as possible so as not to upset the gentle people at Kellogg's."
[Something in the Water? (blog post; January 9, 2012)] ~ Stacia Kane

Country of Origin labelling is something that consumers really want, and I think it's critical to support Australian farmers. ~ Christine Milne

Facts are irrelevant. What matters is what the consumer believes. ~ Seth Godin

Getting calcium from plants might seem a little strange in a society that is so focused on dairy foods as a source of calcium, but some research suggests that even omnivores get as much as 40 percent of their calcium from plant foods. While a strong dairy lobby has convinced many consumers that milk and other dairy foods are essential for a healthy diet, the ability to drink milk into adulthood is not the norm throughout the world. Normal development throughout most of the world involves a gradual loss of the enzyme needed to digest milk sugar after children are weaned from breast milk. We refer to the lack of this enzyme as "lactose intolerance." But that's definitely a western bias since this "intolerance" is not a lack or an abnormality; it's part of normal human development in most people. ~ Jack Norris

As patients and consumers, we are better informed today about our health care than any previous generation. ~ Patricia Hewitt

For years, we've grown dependant on American consumers as the world's spenders of last resort. They've kept Europe out of recession, allowed China to industrialise, and prevented global deflation. But at the same time, they've not been looking after their own futures. ~ Evan Davis

The public sector can only feed off the private sector; it necessarily lives parasitically upon the private economy. But this means that the productive resources of society - far from satisfying the wants of consumers - are now directed, by compulsion, away from these wants and needs. The consumers are deliberately thwarted, and the resources of the economy diverted from them to those activities desire by the parasitic bureaucracy and politicians. ~ Murray Rothbard

We have been seduced by sound bites. It is difficult to imagine how we are going to have an intelligent conversation around complex theopolitical issues as long as the average news consumer in America is willing to be sound-bite driven. We face a sorry state of affairs in our culture when few people seem willing to take the time for nuanced discussion on the complicated challenges we face. Politicians of all parties have been willing to foster this sound-bite mentality because it has worked for them. Most Americans work hard and are faced with too little time and too many distractions to study the issues well enough to make an informed judgment on them. As long as news consumers are willing to be manipulated by sound bites and are unwilling to commit the time to understand the complexities, we will continue to see artificial and simplistic distinctions drive too much of our conversation, resulting in divisions and disagreements that rarely get at the substantive issues. ~ Charles E. Gutenson