Economic Systems Quotes

I like computers. I like the Internet. It's a tool that can be used. But don't be misled into thinking that these technologies are anything other than aspects of a degenerate economic system. ~ Jerry Brown

The best attitude to receive the Pope's teachings is to understand that he is a religious leader and the essence of his message comes from the Gospel, not from one ideology or another.And so, if our economic systems are not oriented toward the human person but only concerned with profits, he wants to confront the system and change it. This, by the way, is common to all the popes, it comes directly from the so-called social teachings of the church. ~ Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo

Frankly, [the definition of woman] is a problem that the lesbians do not have because of a change of perspective. 'Woman' has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual, economic systems. Lesbians are not women. ~ Monique Wittig

There is a certain beauty and refinement that is often found in our world and it is expensive. It shouldn't necessarily be so. It is just the way our economic system is. ~ Frederick Lenz

A leader has to know how the system functions - not just the system of government but the whole social and economic system, including business, the unions, and the universities. ~ Jean Chretien

The world is a complex, interconnected, finite, ecological-social-psychological-economic system . We treat it as if it were not, as if it were divisible, separable, simple, and infinite. Our persistent, intractable global problems arise directly from this mismatch. ~ Donella Meadows

The negative side to globalization is that it wipes out entire economic systems and in doing so wipes out the accompanying culture. ~ Peter L. Berger

It has been a long fight to put the control of our economic system in the hands of the government. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Man cannot relinquish himself or the place in the visible world that belongs to him; he cannot become the slave of things, the slave of economic systems, the slave of production, the slave of his own products. A civilization purely materialistic in outline condemns man to such slavery, even if at times, no doubt, this occurs contrary to the intentions and the very premise of its pioneers. ~ Pope John Paul II

I think American interests are served when there are sections of the world that have representative governments, politically open economic systems, and are willing to take a stand against some of the more extreme ideologies that there are around the world. ~ Dennis C. Blair

You cannot go to sleep with one form of economic system and wake up the next morning with another. ~ Mikhail Gorbachev

A book can only end one of two ways: truthfully or artfully. If it ends artfully, then it never feels quite right. It feels forced, manipulated. If it ends truthfully, then the story ends badly, in death. It's the reason most theories and religions and economic systems break down before you get too far into them
and the reason Buddhism and the Beach Boys make sense to teenagers, because they're too young to know what life really is: a frantic struggle that always ends the same way. The only thing that varies is the beginning and the middle. Life itself always ends badly. ~ Jess Walter

Economic growth springs not chiefly from incentives - carrots and sticks, rewards and punishments for workers and entrepreneurs. The incentive theory of capitalism allows its critics to depict it as an inhumane scheme of clever manipulation of human needs and hungers scarcely superior to the more benign forms of slavery. Wealth actually springs from the expansion of information and learning, profits and creativity that enhance the human qualities of its beneficiaries as it enriches them. Workers' learning increasingly compensates for their labor, which imparts knowledge as it extracts work. Joining knowledge and power, capitalism focuses on the entropy of human minds and the benefits of freedom. Thus it is the most humane of all economic systems. ~ George Gilder

Premise Eight: The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system. ~ Derrick Jensen

Interventionism cannot be considered as an economic system destined to stay. It is a method for the transformation of capitalism into socialism by a series of successive steps. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

The ability of the 1 percent to buy politicians and regulators is nothing new in American politics - just as inequality has been a permanent part of our economic system. This is true of virtually all political and economic systems. ~ Eric Alterman

No matter how much the government controls the economic system, any problem will be blamed on whatever small zone of freedom that remains. ~ Sheldon Richman

We don't have to seek new economic systems. We have to transform the people who run them. ~ Sadghuru

First of all, I am not an expert on matters on different economic systems, but in my normal social intercourse with my friends we discussed matters like that. ~ Julius And Ethel Rosenberg

One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits. ~ Susan Sontag

We can only live the changes we wish to see: we cannot think our way to humanity. Every one of us, every group, must become the model of that which we desire to create. We must break the obsolete social and economic systems that divide the world between the over-privileged and the under-privileged. Each of us, whether government leader or protester, business executive or worker, professor or student, share a common guilt. ~ Ivan Illich

But what I believe is that if a person's individual rights or right to be a part of our economic system is violated under statute, we aggressively go after it. But we don't issue mandates to businesses that you've got to do this and you've got to do that. ~ Clarence Thomas

The Capitalist system with its exploitation of those who are economically weak, with its robbery of the workers labour power, with its unethical way of appraising human beings by the number of things and the amount of money he possesses, instead of by their internal value and their achievements, must be replaced by a new and just economic system, in a word by German Socialism. ~ Gregor Strasser

The cash register did more for human morality than the Congregational Church. It was a really powerful phenomenon to make an economic system work better, just as, in reverse, a system that can be easily defrauded ruins a civilization. A system that's very hard to defraud, like a cash register, helped the economic performance of a civilization by reducing vice, but very few people within economics talk about it in those terms. ~ Charlie Munger

We measure the success of schools not by the kinds of human beings they promote but by whatever increases in reading scores they chalk up. We have allowed quantitative standards, so central to the adult economic system, to become the principal yardstick for our definition of our children's worth. ~ Kenneth Keniston

The profit motive, when it is the sole basis of an economic system, encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition that inspires men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

An economics of systems only-an economics of markets but not of men-is fatally flawed. ~ George Gilder

Our social and economic system cannot march toward better days unless it is inspired by things of the Spirit. It is here that the higher purposes of individualism must find their sustenance. ~ Herbert Hoover

Corruption.
like anything it is systematic, and without a level of corruption ost societies would seize up, the levels of accepted/expected political corruption don't even raise eyebrows anymore, especially when it runs parallel to our economic systems, so I guess we are stuck with it. ~ Steve Merrick

Capitalism, gaudy and greedy, has been inherent in western aesthetics from ancient Egypt on. It is the mysticism and glamour of things , which take on a personality of their own. As an economic system, it is in the Darwinian line of Sade, not Rousseau. ~ Camille Paglia

Open political and economic systems have been gaining ground and there's a good reason for it. They work better. ~ George P. Shultz

Money ... is the nerve center of the economic system. If, therefore, the state is able to gain unquestioned control over the unit of all accounts, the state will then be in a position to dominate the entire economic system, and the whole society. ~ Murray Rothbard

I think the market driven economic system is the most productive system, but to have that work in the world, you've got to also have social investments to go along with that. ~ Mike Lowry

A character standard is far more important than even a gold standard. The success of all economic systems is still dependent upon both righteous leaders and righteous people. In the last analysis, our national future depends upon our national character that is, whether it is spiritually or materially minded. ~ Roger Babson

Economics is more than just a way to see patterns or to unravel puzzling anomalies. Its fundamental concern is with the material standard of living of society as a whole and how that is affected by particular decisions made by individuals and institutions. One of the ways of doing this is to look at economic policies and economic systems in terms of the incentives they create, rather than simply the goals they pursue. This means that consequences matter more than intentions - and not just the immediate consequences, but also the longer run repercussions of decisions, policies, and institutions. ~ Thomas Sowell

I should like to suggest to you that the cause of all the economic troubles is that we have an economic system which tries to maintain an equality of value between two things, which it would be better to recognise from the beginning as of unequal value. ~ Paul Dirac

Global poverty is an input on the supply side; the global economic system feeds on cheap labor. ~ Michel Chossudovsky

The main message we want to get out there is that climate change is caused by the rotten economic system. ~ Vivienne Westwood

There are a few people, but a diminishing number, who still believe that Marxism, as an economic system, off era a coherent alternative to capitalism, and socialism has, indeed, triumphed in one country. ~ Herbert Read

During the 1930s, some of the leading intellectuals in America condemned our economic system and pointed to the centrally planned Soviet economy as a model
all this at a time when literally millions of people were starving to death in the Soviet Union, from a famine in a country with some of the richest farmland in Europe and historically a large exporter of food. ~ Thomas Sowell

The normal economic system works itself. ~ James Salter

There can be no peace in the world so long as a large proportion of the population lack the necessities of life and believe that a change of the political and economic system will make them available. World peace must be based on world plenty. ~ John Boyd Orr

If we compare two static economic systems, which differ in no way from one another except that in one there is twice as much money as in the other, it appears that the purchasing power of the monetary unit in the one system must be equal to half that of the monetary unit in the other. Nevertheless, we may not conclude from this that a doubling of the quantity of money must lead to a halving of the purchasing power of the monetary unit; for every variation in the quantity of money introduces a dynamic factor into the static economic system. The new position of static equilibrium that is established when the effects of the fluctuations thus set in motion are completed cannot be the same as that which existed before the introduction of the additional quantity of money. Consequently, in the new state of equilibrium the conditions of demand for money, given a certain exchange-value of the monetary unit, will also be different. If the purchasing power of each unit of the doubled quantity of money were halved, the unit would not have the same significance for each individual under the new conditions as it had in the static system before the increase in the quantity of money. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

It is impossible to understand the economic system in which we are living if we try to interpret it as a rational scheme.It has to be understood as an awkward phase in a continuing process of historical development. ~ Edwin Arlington Robinson

Economic systems come, and economic systems go. No economic system lasts forever. Capitalism is not likely to last forever, either. ~ Jim Stanford

Politicon should be applauded for recognizing the increasing impact of technology, not only on American social and economic systems but on the very structure of our system of politics. ~ John McAfee

In my view, after fifty years of service in the United National system, I perceive the utmost urgency and absolute necessity for proper Earth government. There is no shadow of a doubt that the present political and economic systems are no longer appropriate and will lead to the end of life evolution on this planet. We must therefore absolutely and urgently look for new ways. ~ Robert Muller

The current economic system is fundamentally flawed and inevitably destructive. ~ David Suzuki

What is applicable is to understand that first of all China has undergone a huge revolution in the last years. Anyone who saw China as I did in 1971 - and for that matter even in 1979, because not much had changed between 1971 and 1979 - and sees China today, knows one is in a different economic system. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Whether humanity is to comprehensively prosper ... depends entirely on the integrity of the human individuals and not on the political and economic systems. The cosmic question has been asked: are humans worthwhile to universe invention? ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Here's what I don't think works: An economic system that was founded in the 16th century and another that was founded in the 19th century. I'm tired of this discussion of capitalism and socialism; we live in the 21st century; we need an economic system that has democracy as its underpinnings and an ethical code. ~ Michael Moore

I view derivatives as time bombs, both for the parties that deal in them and the economic system. ~ Warren Buffett

Economic systems rise and fall just like empires. That's the kind of perspective we need to take if we hope to prosper for centuries rather than for the next quarter. ~ Annalee Newitz

If you cloned JFK and Abraham Lincoln and made them president it wouldn't matter. Our system is just too corrupt and too broken. I think that science is corrupt and broken. I think health and nutrition. I think the economic systems, the international relations, the environment, everything, the engines of everything are broken. ~ Rainn Wilson

When I first saw China, there were no automobiles. There were no supermarkets. There were no high-rise buildings. There were no consumer goods. There were no restaurants that were at least accessible that foreigners could see. It was a Stalinist society, and a very poor Stalinist society. So the economic system has totally changed, and the private sector in the economic system is now the dominant sector. It didn't exist at all as late as 1979. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

What a hell of an economic system! Some are replete with everything while others, whose stomachs are no less demanding, whose hunger is just as recurrent, have nothing to bite on. The worst of it is the constrained posture need puts you in. The needy man does not walk like the rest; he skips, slithers, twists, crawls. ~ Denis Diderot

No economic system is perfect. But the American Free Enterprise system has empowered millions of people in the past. I know, because I saw it with my own eyes. ~ Marco Rubio

Slaves in the past were captured by force; today's slaves surrender themselves. The masters are the same old folk (who are now more civilized) who would not lift a hand against a fellow human being! They have established economic systems that perpetuate their superiority so the poor are blamed either for their laziness or their fate. ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

The reductionist measure of yield is to agriculture systems, what GDP is to economic systems. It is time to move from measuring yield of commodities, to health and well-being of ecosystems and communities. Industrial agriculture has its roots in war. Ecological agriculture allows us to make peace with the earth, soil and the society. ~ Vandana Shiva

Until there is peace between religions, there can be no peace in the world. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

What Ethereum Is Good For Ethereum is suited to building economic systems in pure software. In other words, it's software for business logic, wherein people (users) can move money (data representing value) around with the speed and scale that we normally get with data.12 Not the three- to seven-day floating period you get with the commercial banking system. Or the fees associated with vendors such as Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal. With a simple Ethereum application, for example, it is fairly trivial to pay hundreds of thousands of people, in hundreds of countries, small amounts every few minutes, whereas in the legacy banking system you would need an entire payroll department working overtime to constantly rebalance your account ledgers and deal with the cross-border issues. ~ Chris Dannen

The Lockean assumption that if we put our labor to it then it becomes our own is totally fallacious. We have to figure out how to leave things alone, and build an economic system that's not built on a linear model, but instead on a cyclical model, because that's the natural world - it's cyclical and not linear. That is going to take a lot of transformation. ~ Winona LaDuke

Today we have access to highly advanced technologies. But our social and economic system has not kept up with our technological capabilities that could easily create a world of abundance, free of servitude and debt. ~ Jacque Fresco

The time has come to educate people, to cease all quarrels in the name of religion, culture, countries, different political or economic systems. Fighting is useless. Suicide. ~ Dalai Lama

I believe war is the inevitable fruit of our economic system ... ~ Helen Keller

America ... an economic system prouder of the distribution of its products than of the products themselves. ~ Murray Kempton

I had an economic system imposed on me. ~ Lauryn Hill

My analysis, especially of the computer revolution, always comes back to capitalism. It's that economic system that has led to Western civilization's willingness to enslave ourselves to machines - because some people benefit enormously from it, while the costs are borne by other people and the planet. ~ Kirkpatrick Sale

We don't have the leadership or the understanding of the value of this, and when your political systems and your economic systems start to fail, it's only a cultural understanding that allows you to reconstruct them and to get back to who you are. For some reason, it hasn't dawned on us yet. ~ Wynton Marsalis

You have increasing poverty and increasing wealth. Fine food is one way to dispense with a lot of money ... It's understanding that our daily choices about food connect us to a worldwide economic system. And that economic system - not scarcity - creates worldwide hunger for millions of people. ~ Frances Moore Lappe

Racism is an effect of slavery, not the other way around. Once slavery was abolished, not only did racism not disappear, neither did the economic system it upheld. ~ Sarah Churchwell

Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out. ~ Raoul Vaneigem

While I have questions about the language used in describing the two economic systems, I think people have fairly good gut sense of the difference between socialism and capitalism. ~ Chris Matthews

Maybe slavery has been with us for centuries because of the inclination to maintain economic systems geared more toward commodifying human existence than developing its spiritual, creative, or scientific potentials. Such commodification instantly erases any recognition of humanity as a priceless value unto itself and reduces individuals as well as entire races, or a specific gender, to a bargain-priced 'other. ~ Aberjhani

Oh, Rachel, Rachel," Leah said. "Let me give you a teeny little lesson in political science. Democracy and dictatorship are political systems; they have to do with who participates in the leadership. Socialism and capitalism are economic systems. It has to do with who owns the wealth of the nations, and who gets to eat. Can you grasp that? ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Our social and economic systems are so devoid of humanity and love. ~ Russell Brand

The fact that industries wax and wane is a reality of any economic system that wants to remain dynamic and responsive to people's changing tastes. ~ James Surowiecki

If our economic system is to survive, there has to be a better distribution of wealth ... we can't have a system where some people live in superfluous, inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

But no one can praise Roosevelt for doing this and then insist that he restored our traditional political and economic systems to their former vitality. ~ John T. Flynn

China reformed its state sector before, in the late 1990s. Tens of millions were laid off at the time. That was scary and we had warnings of social unrest. But it did not happen. Instead, there was a restructuring in our economic system. I am not sure if China will follow a Western playbook in this respect. ~ Zhang Xin

Whether we understand work spiritually depends in large part on whether we understand the economy spiritually. If we view the economy materialistically, thinking that economics is just about numbers on spreadsheets and arcane policy issues, we'll tend to view work materialistically. On the other hand, if we have the vision to see that the economy is really a moral system, a vast web of human relationships where people exchange their work with one another, we'll tend to see the spiritual dignity and meaning of our work. That's why dramatic economic changes, like the ones we're all going through right now, make people especially likely to despiritualize their work. At such times, the older economic systems and institutions that had embodied the spirituality of work for earlier generations become obsolete. We lose the sense that our work is part of a greater social whole that has dignity and purpose. As a result, our own work loses its sense of dignity and purpose. ~ Greg Forster

THE MISCONCEPTION: We could create a system with no regulations where everyone would contribute to the good of society, everyone would benefit, and everyone would be happy. THE TRUTH: Without some form of regulation, slackers and cheaters will crash economic systems because people don't want to feel like suckers. ~ David McRaney

There must be an end to white monopoly on political power, and a fundamental restructuring of our political and economic systems to ensure that the inequalities of apartheid are addressed and our society thoroughly democratized. ~ Nelson Mandela

Throughout human history, the American Idea has done more to help the poor than any other economic system ever designed. ~ Paul Ryan

If the machinery for distribution in the present economic system of the world is incapable of properly distributing the productive wealth of nations, then that system is false and must be altered. ~ Gregor Strasser

Humans are constantly, and in every way, comparing themselves to one another, which, given the brief nature of their existence, seems an oddity and, for that matter, a waste. Nevertheless, this is the driving influence behind every human's social development, their emotional health and sense of joy, and, sadly, their greatest tragedies. It is as though something that helped them function and live well has gone missing, and they are pining for that missing thing in all sorts of odd methods, none of which are working. The greater tragedy is that very few people understand they have the disease. This seems strange as well because it is obvious. To be sure, it is killing them, and yet sustaining their social and economic systems. They are an entirely beautiful people with a terrible problem. ~ Donald Miller

If people understood how the economic system works, there'd be a revolution in a minute. ~ Henry Ford

When you print money, the money does not flow evenly into the economic system. It stays essentially in the financial service industry and among people that have access to these funds, mostly well-to-do people. It does not go to the worker. ~ Marc Faber

For nearly two centuries, scholars and politicians have debated the future of capitalism. Its critics, most prominent among them Karl Marx, have seen capitalism as intrinsically unstable, full of contradictions that will lead eventually to its collapse. Its supporters see it as the best way to allocate resources and rewards. Some even hint that the democratic capitalistic society is not just a phase in the historical evolution of economic systems but its ultimate end. ~ Raghuram Rajan

Though my heart may be left of centre, I have always known that the only economic system that works is a market economy ... This is the only natural economy, the only kind that makes sense, the only one that can lead to prosperity, because it is the only one that reflects the nature of life itself. ~ Vaclav Havel

Total revolution of consciousness and our entire social, political and economic system is what interests me, but that's not on the ballot. ~ Russell Brand

It's our machines and our technologies that are now the major evolutionary forces acting upon us. It's not our political systems. ~ Terence McKenna

Official motto of the White House economic team: Those who can, do. Those who can't, fantasize in the classroom, fail in Washington and then return to the Ivy Tower to train the next generation of egghead economic saboteurs. Life is good for left-wing academics. Everyone else pays dearly. ~ Michelle Malkin

Man's inhumanity to man is not the last word. The truth lies deeper. It is economic slavery, the savage struggle for a crumb, that has converted mankind into wolves and sheep. ~ Alexander Berkman

In Venezuela Chavez has made the co-ops a top political priority, giving them first refusal on government contracts and offering them economic incentives to trade with one another. By 2006, there were roughly 100,000 co-operatives in the country, employing more than 700,000 workers. Many are pieces of state infrastructure – toll booths, highway maintenance, health clinics – handed over to the communities to run. It's a reverse of the logic of government outsourcing – rather than auctioning off pieces of the state to large corporations and losing democratic control, the people who use the resources are given the power to manage them, creating, at least in theory, both jobs and more responsive public services. Chavez's many critics have derided these initiatives as handouts and unfair subsidies, of course. Yet in an era when Halliburton treats the U.S. government as its personal ATM for six years, withdraws upward of $20 billion in Iraq contracts alone, refuses to hire local workers either on the Gulf coast or in Iraq, then expresses its gratitude to U.S. taxpayers by moving its corporate headquarters to Dubai (with all the attendant tax and legal benefits), Chavez's direct subsidies to regular people look significantly less radical. ~ Naomi Klein

Economic growth is not just a process of more and better machines, and more and better educated people, but also a transformative and destabilizing process associated with widespread creative destruction. Growth thus moves forward only if not blocked by the economic losers who anticipate that their economic privileges will be lost and by the political losers who fear that their political power will be eroded. Conflict ~ Anonymous

Cultures, along with the religions that shape and nurture them, are value systems, sets of traditions and habits clustered around one or several languages, producing meaning: for the self, for the here and now, for the community, for life. ~ Tariq Ramadan

There are several more careers more engaging to follow than that of poetry. But the circumstances of one's birth, the conduct of one's parents, the current economic structure of society, and a thousand other local factors have as much or more to say about successions to such occupations, the naive volitions of the poet to the contrary. ~ Hart Crane

The health of our home planet and the survival of our species will only be secured through the use of space resources and the expansion of Earth's economic sphere to the Moon and beyond. Creating an off-Earth economy and multi-planet civilization will safeguard the long term prospects of humanity. ~ Bob Richards

Imagine connecting with the human spirit in each person in any situation at any time. Imagine interacting with others in a way that allows everyone's need to be equally valued. Imagine creating organizations and life-serving systems responsive to our needs and the needs of our environment. ~ Marshall B. Rosenberg