Crony Capitalism Quotes

I am running to fix the economy, restore the constitutional system of checks and balances and to end this game of crony capitalism by the ruling class in Washington. ~ Dave Brat

Crony capitalism is essentially a condition in which ... public officials are giving favours to people in the private sector in payment of political favours. ~ Alan Greenspan

Note, please, that I condemn only junk science (as does Mr Delingpole): this is in fact a measure of my, and his, regard for good science. Junk bonds do not, by their existence, condemn the existence of markets; crony capitalism – which is indissolubly tied to the 'Green' movement and its loudest advocates, who are bought and paid for by cronyism – does not condemn capitalism; junk science does not invalidate science as a discipline. Indeed, the greatest and most implacable enemies of junk bonds are and by rights ought to be traders; of crony capitalism, capitalists; and of junk science, those who hold true science in its just regard. ~ G.M.W. Wemyss

Other terms used to describe the Putin regime were 'kleptocracy' and 'crony capitalism'---variations on Navalny's theme of the "Party of the Crooks and Thieves." A Hungarian sociologist named Balint Magyar rejected these terms because, he stressed, both 'kleptocracy' and 'crony capitalism' implied a sort of voluntary association---as though one could partake in the crony system or choose not to, and proceed with one's business autonomously, if less profitably. The fate of Khodorkovsky and the exiled oligarchs, as well as of untold thousands of jailed and bankrupted entrepreneurs, demonstrated that this was a fallacy. ~ Masha Gessen

We [the Republicans] help the middle class when we unburden them from the very policies that Hillary Clinton would double down on. She champions Big Government, which we know enables crony capitalism and exacerbates inequality. If you are wealthy, powerful and well-connected, you can handle Big Government. ~ Carly Fiorina

Big-government economics breeds crony capitalism. It's corrupt, anything but neutral, and a barrier to broad participation in prosperity. ~ Paul Ryan

The kind of capitalism I hate most is crony capitalism, the friends who decide. These are things which should be killed in Russia. ~ Anatoly Chubais

Crony capitalism is alive and well: the big are bigger, the wealthy are getting wealthier because, with a very large powerful complicated government, which is what we have and which Democrats want more of, only the big, the powerful, the wealthy and the well connected can survive. ~ Carly Fiorina

Crony capitalism is much easier than competing in an open market. But it erodes our overall standard of living and stifles entrepreneurs by rewarding the politically favored rather than those who provide what consumers want. ~ Charles Koch

We do not have free market capitalism in America; we have crony capitalism. There is a huge difference between free market capitalism that democratizes a country and makes us more efficient and prosperous and corporate crony capitalism. ~ Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Unless there is free and fair competition, there can't be healthy economic development. And what we have in Burma now is not an open-market economy that allows free and fair competition, but a form of colonialism makes a few people very, very wealthy. It's what you would crony capitalism. ~ Aung San Suu Kyi

Poverty was nature surviving in society; that the limitedness of food and the unlimitedness of men had come to an issue just when the promise of boundless increase of wealth burst in upon us made the irony only the more bitter. ~ Karl Polanyi

One always has to worry when capitalism has a role in health care. If you're just using health care to make money, you will treat the wrong diseases. Capitalism has its limits. There is a role for governments, and this is one where they should be involved. ~ Richard J. Roberts

The impotence of liberal humanism is a symptom of its essentially contradictory relationship to modern capitalism. For although it forms part of the 'official' ideology of such society, and the 'humanities' exist to reproduce it, the social order within which it exists has in one sense very little time for it at all. Who is concerned with the uniqueness of the individual, the imperishable truths of the human condition or the sensuous textures of lived experience in the Foreign Office or the boardroom of Standard Oil? Capitalism's reverential hat-tipping to the arts is obvious hypocrisy, except when it can hang them on its walls as a sound investment. Yet capitalist states have continued to direct funds into higher education humanities departments, and though such departments are usually the first in line for savage cutting when capitalism enters on one of its periodic crises, it is doubtful that it is only hypocrisy, a fear of appearing in its true philistine colours, which compels this grudging support. The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster. The 'unique individual' is indeed important when it comes to defending the business entrepreneur's right to make profit while throwing men and women out of work; the individual must at all costs have the 'right to choose', provided this means the right to buy one's child an expensive private education while other children are depri ~ Terry Eagleton

Essentially, not only do we believe in this myth of 'de-risking', but it has become the one overriding goal; de-risking above growth, de-risking above innovation, de-risking above everything else. And we've reached the point where the Fed is using $70 Billion a month to 'de-risk' a largely insolvent banking system. And this can only end badly. The idea that you can do capitalism without risk is ridiculous on its face. ~ Andreas Antonopoulos

There are no owners in nature. ~ Freequill

Deregulation created this epidemic of greed which according to the rules of capitalism was OK. Beyond that there was criminal behaviour. There have been no repercussions and it's hard to make your peace with. ~ Brad Pitt

The billionaire investor George Soros has coined a term to describe this perspective: "free market fundamentalism." It is the belief not simply that free markets are the best way to run an economic system, but that free markets are the only way that will not ultimately destroy our other freedoms. "The doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest,"36 Soros wrote. ~ Naomi Oreskes

It is a democratic uprising. I'd say a democratic revolution against imperialism and against capitalism. So the agreements between us, more than that, any cooperation means unconditional credit, while the US and some capitalist countries want to help us under conditions, under blackmail. ~ Evo Morales

Communism has failed; capitalism has failed; common sense has failed; now has to fail stupidity. ~ William C. Brown

The task of defending capitalism was still important to leave to the capitalists. ~ Rick Perlstein

Then life began, and since then we remember each dumpster, abandoned house, and foot-chase by retail security. At night, after running around, plotting and scheming, our checklist items all crossed out, we paused to think - 'What to do tomorrow?' and the answer was always, 'As we please ... ~ CrimethInc.

Giving is the vital impulse and moral center of capitalism. ~ George Gilder

Initially, class privilege was not discussed by white women in the women's movement. They wanted to project an image of themselves as victims and that could not be done by drawing attention to their class. In fact, the contemporary women's movement was extremely class bound. As a group, white participants did not denounce capitalism. They chose to define liberation using the terms of white capitalist patriarchy, equating liberation with gaining economic status and money power. Like all good capitalists, they proclaimed work as the key to liberation. This emphasis on work was yet another indication of the extent to which the white female liberationists' perception of reality was totally narcissistic, classist, and racist. Implicit in the assertion that work was the key to women's liberation was a refusal to acknowledge the reality that, for masses of American working class women, working for pay neither liberated them from sexist oppression nor allowed them to gain any measure of economic independence. ~ Bell Hooks

The idea that in the system, if you manage it in an optimum way, all of the constituent parts of the system also win, flourish, and benefit, is intrinsic to business and even to capitalism itself, properly understood. But people don't understand it because we're not taught to think that way. ~ John Mackey

Here's something I still can't get over. Amazes and thrills me every time. I'm sitting here and want a certain book. So I search, click, and then I have the book. Every time, my heart does a little leap of joy. What a beautiful world the market is making. ~ Jeffrey Tucker

Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others - the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison. ~ Eduardo Galeano

Capitalism is the fullest expression of anarchism, and anarchism is the fullest expression of capitalism. Not only are they compatible, but you can't really have one without the other. True anarchism will be capitalism, and true capitalism will be anarchism ~ Murray N. Rothbard

Economics as a discipline has in effect become the study of capitalism. The two are taken as the same subject. ~ John Lanchester

Under a socialist mode of production all personal incentives which selfishness provides under capitalism are removed, and a premium is put upon laziness and negligence. Whereas in a capitalist society selfishness incites everyone to the utmost diligence, in a socialist society it makes for inertia and laxity. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

The profit of the one is the profit of the other. ~ Frederic Bastiat

Because there is nothing, nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right. We took nothing. Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is 'superior' to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. It is a box - Urras is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

In proportion as you give the state power to do things for you, you give it power to do things to you. ~ Albert Jay Nock

Modernism had two great wishes. It wanted its audience to be led toward a recognition of the social reality of the sign (away from the comforts of narrative and illusionism, was the claim); but equally it dreamed of turning the sign back to a bedrock of World/Nature/Sensation/Subjectivity which the to and fro of capitalism had all but destroyed. ~ T.J. Clark

Nobody has to tell me about the glories of the capitalist system. But what concerns me is that there no longer seems to be a commitment to make the opportunities afforded by technology and capitalism universally accessible. ~ Marianne Williamson

Technology and Ideology are shaking the foundations of 21st century capitalism. Technology is making skills and knowledge the only sources of sustainable strategic advantage. ~ Lester Thurow

Happily, financial capitalism and free trade have not done away with national languages and literatures, as Marx rather too blithely hoped. ~ Pankaj Mishra

During these years in the small-talk wilderness, I also wondered why Americans valued friendliness with commerce so much. Was handing over cash the sacred rite of American capitalism - and of American life? On a day that I don't spend money in America, I feel oddly depressed. It's my main form of social interaction - as it is for millions of Americans who live alone or away from their families. ~ Karan Mahajan

There are some things in the world we can't change- gravity, entropy, the speed of light, and our biological nature that requires clean air, clean water, clean soil, clean energy and biodiversity for our health and well-being. Protecting the biosphere should be our highest priority or else we sicken and die. Other things, like capitalism, free enterprise, the economy, currency, the market, are not forces of nature, we invented them. They are not immutable and we can change them. It makes no sense to elevate economics above the biosphere. ~ David Suzuki

Deeply rooted in the universalist Western tradition of the Stoics and the the early medieval Christians, Tolkien created a myth to explore the nature of the human person against the avaricious dreams of the capitalists and the diabolical schemes of the national and international socialists, all of whom would replace God with man. ~ Bradley J. Birzer

Our radicals fail to realize that to accomplish the reorganization of work, it is necessary to have workers – and workers with the free spirit, the rebellious spirit, which will consider its own worth and refuse to accept the slavish conditions of capitalism. These must be bred in schools where work is done, and done proudly, and in full consciousness of its value; where the dubious services of the capitalist will likewise be rated at their true worth; and no man reckoned as above another, unless he has done a greater social service. Where political institutions and the politicians who operate them…will be candidly criticized, and repudiate when justice dictates so, whether in the teaching of their past history, or their present actions in current events. ~ Voltairine De Cleyre

Writing: such has been my crime ever since I was a small child. To this day writing remains my crime. Now, although I am out of prison, I continue to live inside a prison of another sort, one without steel bars. For the technology of oppression and might without justice has become more advanced, and the fetters imposed on mind and body have become invisible. The most dangerous shackles are the invisible ones, because they deceive people into believing they are free. This delusion is the new prison that people inhabit today, north and south, east and west...We inhabit the age of the technology of false consciousness, the technology of hiding truths behind amiable humanistic slogans that may change from one era to another...Democracy is not just freedom to criticize the government or head of state, or to hold parliamentary elections. True democracy obtains only when the people - women, men, young people, children - have the ability to change the system of industrial capitalism that has oppressed them since the earliest days of slavery: a system based on class division, patriarchy, and military might, a hierarchical system that subjugates people merely because they are born poor, or female, or dark-skinned. ~ Nawal El Saadawi

The major western democracies are moving towards corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies - socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor - and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food. ~ John Pilger