Tag: quotebag

“I agree about the negative consequences of ‘crony capitalism’. But is crony capitalism only defined as an unwholesome alliance between government and business? What about unwholesome alliances between businesses?”—Poor Richard

“A common job interview question is ‘Why do you want this job?’ And the true answer, ‘Because it’s a job,’ is not acceptable.”—impudent strumpet

“Contempt is the only way to manage others.”—Jack Crow

“The last thing the European left ever needs to do is follow America’s lead of all things when it comes to resistance, just as the last thing US Occupiers need is to lose themselves in a narcissistic fantasy that they are leading the world only to be lead by the nose by incumbent-elites to domesticate a real possibility for organized resistance into another Burning Man.”—Dale Carrico

“I also have a sense that many of the most ardent reactionaries hold to a very strange version of the labor theory of value, wherein the unworthy poor are sapping surplus off of the vigorous masters.”—Nerdy McGee

“Remember, modern elites are trained to think in terms of cost-benefit analyses. If the cost to them of not giving in is less than the cost of not giving in, they won’t give in. It took trillions of dollars to bail out Wall Street. They take home billions of dollars in personal bonuses. You must cost them, personally, more than that, for them to want to give in.”—Ian Welsh

“How come the people who say they worry about SS going broke never worry about the US Armed Forces going broke? Because they WANT SS to go broke.”—Bill Wald

“You can’t ‘spend’ your way out of public debt but you can’t cut or save your way out of it either.”—Poor Richard

“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and rebellion.”—Oscar Wilde

“Everybody needs to make a living, and in our system, everybody needs to do so visibly and individually, which means we are all co-opted to some degree, trained to chase the various currencies of success (grants, papers, awards, accolades, sales, page views).”—Justin Podur

“Sure, you’ll tell me about the moral hazard of giving someone something for free — never mind the trillions we’ve given to banksters and other common thieves. And you’ll tell me how those people should’ve just gotten a job — never mind that there are 4.3 applicants for every open position.”—Michael Alan Miller

“The puppet hanging on the board is Paul Samuelson, iconic mathturbater and textbook author, whose Economics taught a generation of economists to bark like trained seals, ‘Lump-of-labor fallacy! Lump of labor fallacy!’ The mouth opens and closes; the arms and legs flap.”—Sandwichman

“We have the basic fact, pointed out by Adam Smith all those years ago, that the bosses will combine in order to lower wages just as readily as and with far greater ease than workers can combine to raise wages. Most capitalists will also be at pains to point out, in different contexts of course, that labour is a cost. We are nothing but a resource which it is in their interests to get as much out of for as little as possible. Hence the class antagonism created by the wage labour system.”—Phil Dickens

“My primary autistic problem is poverty.”—Laura Nagle

“We have a two-party, one-ideology system of governance, and the ideology is one of economic growth at all costs.”—JP Hayes

“The problem of pimps is a problem of people. The problem is not merely that a few sociopaths exploit others for their own gain; the problem is that human beings come with built-in exploits, honed by evolution and primed by life experiences, that allow them to be exploited by sociopaths (who constitute at least 3% of the general population).”—Sister Y

“Hiding is futile. Our only path is sousveillance. Looking back.”—David Brin

“I have a terror of networking as a practice not only because of my autism but also because I always feel embarrassed when I observe these naked attempts to exploit festive occasions to meet the right people.”—Clarissa

“The dirty little secret is that the service economy sector with the greatest prospect of expansion is also the one in which the most efficient and least costly way of operating is for the customers to do it themselves.”—Sandwichman

“When the game of making human babies did not have a good opt-out (i.e., prior to around 1970 C.E.), participation in the wider information games was largely instrumental for better playing the breeding game. But with good ways to opt out of breeding new humans, the original game – the game of breeding to pass some of one’s genetic information into the future — is coming to be recognized as a small, rather pathetic subset of the total space of information games.”—Sister Y

“I am optimistic that in 100 years the world will find a new economic system. I am optimistic that this system wont resemble capitalism or socialism at all.”—Rohit

“While technology offers solutions to resource problems in theory, in practice it also favors greater stratification of wealth and power. If recent trends continue we may be faced with a future of corporate neofeudalism (privatized governance).”—Poor Richard

“Scarcity pricing tickets to an expert’s panel on a new beginning for communism takes chutzpah.”—Jack Crow

“Businesses, especially big ones, aren’t any more efficient or competent than government just because they have to pursue a profit margin. What gives the impression that they are is just that their decisions are made behind closed doors without them being subject to public scrutiny and complaining.”—Eric B.

“Instead of ‘the dismal science,’ economics might be referred to as ‘the dismal religion.’”—Buffalo14

“Ronald Reagan was an asshole, and it’s high time liberals stopped trying quixotically to score cleverness points by declaring him a better asshole than the assholes the Republicans are now.”—Dale Carrico

“Our problem is not that we don’t have enough stuff — it’s that we don’t have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.”—Douglas Rushkoff

“Having a cell phone and laptop doesn’t magically pay my rent or give me meaningful decision-making power in my workplace. Power relationships count regardless of the shiny toys involved. I want more than improvement in material conditions. I want genuine liberation.”—Summerspeaker

“An English friend of mine once said, when he encountered the annual cost of attending a US uni, ‘Thank god I didn’t have to mortgage my future just to have one’. Those happy days are now, apparently, over.”—Priyanka Nandy

“You add new lanes, even MORE people will drive, putting us right back at square one! Instead of throwing tons of money at a short-term solution, why not spend it on improving bus and rail service and encouraging carpooling? Oh, and get more highway patrol officers to crack down on these violent drivers who pose safety threats to the rest of us.”—Jean-Paul Wong

“So there’ll be a lot less paid work available, and a lot of stuff we’re still paying for will be either free or very cheap. But if you put it all together in the form of a Venn diagram, to what extent will the receipt of income from the remaining paid work overlap with the need to expend money for the remaining goods and services with a money price?”—Kevin Carson

“We need to address the core facts: these corporations, even if they were unable to compete in the electoral arena, would still remain control of society.”—AnonOps Communications

“Party conferences are irrelevant. The private sector runs the world. Let’s start sending thousands of press to their meetings.”—Kate B

“This frugal economy will be wishful thinking unless a way of encouraging it is created. The underlying issue is how gradual, smooth, and thus bearable, the transition will be. Will it encourage the cooperation that has always sustained cultural evolution, or will it foster the Darwinian hell of a survival of the most aggressive?”—Franco Iacomella

“There have been minor exceptions, such as the French ban on niqabs and burqas. Liberals have tried to turn this into a human rights issue, that we should have the right to wear whatever we want. First of all, this is an extremely disingenuous position for liberals to take, since they support a capitalist system which most definitely does not give people the right to wear whatever they want; if they were serious about such a position, they would be advocating a ban on corporate-imposed clothing and uniforms as well.”—François Tremblay

“Part of the problem is that capitalist economics have invented a fictional type of person, whose wants are limitless: someone who always wants more and more of everything and so whose needs could only satisfied if resources were limitless too. Needless to say, such an individual has never existed. In reality, our wants are not limitless — people have diverse tastes and we rarely want everything available nor do we want more of a thing than is necessary to satisfies our needs.”—Alan MacSimoin

“Honestly, all the ads front-loaded onto my new DVD were so absolutely captivating I didn’t even notice that I couldn’t fast forward through them anymore, I was just drinking in every second of sparkling advertizing content in a kind rapture spoiled only by a slow-growing dread that all too soon the commercials would end and I would be left with nothing to watch but the actual goddamn film I actually paid my goddamn money to watch in my goddamn home on my own goddamn time in the goddamn first place, goddamn it!”—Dale Carrico

“For information to be free, the coordinates of the information must be free.”—James Alexander Levy

“There is a difference between saving and making money when you’re unemployed. Once you’re already rich, saving money and making money is the same thing, but for people who are on the bottom or even in the middle classes, saving money doesn’t help you if you don’t have the money to save in the first place.”—Jaron Lanier

“The elimination of corporate tyranny is a prerequisite for solving all other social and economic anomalies which exist in this world.”—Randolph Greer

“[Mitt] Romney, as an executive, was to downsizing what Typhoid Mary was to typhoid.”—Kevin Carson

“The part that doesn’t make sense about Libertairan Oil Platform Nations is that if they have enough wealth to be self-sustaining, then they have enough wealth to buy a government. The oil platform is unnecessary.”—rewinn

“They claim to support having ‘voluntary authority’ or ‘voluntary hierarchy’ – who would willingly choose to be on the bottom of the hierarchy?”—Τζούλια Ρήμπερ Πιτ

“Randism is as much a blight on society as Communism is.”—Larry Hart

“It’s time to break the job trance: the concept of J.O.B. as sole or ultimate Justification Of Being for humans. Jobs are simply no longer sufficient nor scalable to adaptive progress, moving forward.”—@silverton

“Overcoming Bias is the most ironically titled blog that has ever existed.”—CM

“Nothing like dumping medicine, heal thyself is so much better, after all, we wouldn’t want to impair evolutionary fitness.”—Lord

“The fruits of capitalism, spreading poverty and unemployment, plus billions of dollars for the few, routinely get portrayed as the result of personal failings, bad luck or stupid life choices, not as systemic design flaws.”—Saul Landau

“As we anarchists like to say, all knowledge and all physical capital come from collective effort and are the joint inheritance of the entire species.”—Summerspeaker

“Maybe it has to do with the fact that my eyes glaze over when I see mention of IQ taken seriously.”—Neverfox

“[T]he benefits of greater efficiency are accruing to the already-rich and not society at large, greatly increasing income inequality. I’ve seen no economist explore that, because it does not fit the narrative.”—Chill

“There is going to be a jobless future and the way out of that is to put our faith in hand-waving, fairy-tale answers like ‘innovation’ and ‘entrepreneurship.’”—Pangolin

“In my opinion, one of the biggest weaknesses of Enlightenment liberalism was its naive belief that by just allowing people to engage in whatever economic activity they want without restriction society is aiding in the fulfillment of individual liberty.”—John Madziarczyk

“Hayek was especially right about the importance of near universal transparency so that the most participants could compete with the most knowledge.”—David Brin

“That’s why QE does not fix the economy. Because the money goes to the people who already have money. For QE to work, money must go to people who don’t have money.”—The Arthurian

“The idea that trade is some sort of platonic ideal of virtue, and that it’s not really just a mode of interaction that can be used to accomplish anything when you set the rules a certain way, floors me.”—Jeremy Weiland

“History shows that a mode of travel always deteriorates right after the rich abandon it.”—David Brin

“If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”—Andrew Lewis

“When modern Anarchists talk about Anarchism being a conclusion based on self ownership, they demonstrate extreme ignorance of the history of Anarchism.”—anonymous

“This is a great trap of the twentieth century: on one side is the logic of the market, where we like to imagine we all start out as individuals who don’t owe each other anything. On the other is the logic of the state, where we all begin with a debt we can never truly pay. We are constantly told that they are opposites, and that between them they contain the only real human possibilities. But it’s a false dichotomy. States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today.”—David Graeber

“Hey, I guess to some folks a free market takes precedent [sic] over free humans.”—MountainHiker

“People benefit from most of the spending in direct proportion to their net worth (i.e. the purpose of military, police, social programs, etc. is largely to protect peoples’ property from threats foreign and domestic – which the benefit from in direct proportion to the amount of property they have).”—Jerry

“How is it that the morality of debt can trump any other recognizable form of morality, and make things that no one would ever, possibly agree with in any other context seem suddenly acceptable?”—David Graeber

“I don’t think of Murray Rothbard as somebody that academics need pay any attention to, other than historians studying the American right during the second half of the twentieth century”—Robert Vienneau

“Of course, it’s easy to forget how many choices are made because no other option is available and how often oppressive systems coerce people into enthusiastic participation in their own oppression.”—Clarissa

“The profit motive emerges naturally in a money-based economy, because money equals power. One needs a bare minimum of money-granted power to pay for essentials (food, water, shelter), and any money beyond that grants more and more freedom: the more money you have, you can acquire more things, do more things, and get people to do more things for you. Therefore, the incentive is naturally to get as much money as possible.”—Zacqary Adam Green

“People who have reached the point of despair after years and years of struggling don’t need to be berated for feeling frustrated.”—anonymous