Economy

"The next Monday the class discussed socialism and capitalism. John proposed that only bees, termites and ants were true socialists and that, fundamentally, capitalists get it wrong because the one true fact about wealth was that it was finite like the material universe; and therefore the accrual of wealth did double duty as an engine of poverty."

"In the modern economy, most money takes the form of bank deposits. But how those bank deposits are created is often misunderstood: the principal way [money is created] is through commercial banks making loans. Whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower's bank account, thereby creating new money."

                              — Bank of England ("Money creation in the modern economy")

"If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good, makes the bill good, also...It is absurd to say that our country can issue 30 million dollars in bonds and not 30 million dollars in currency. Both are promises to pay, but one promise fattens the usurers and the other helps the people."

"… the notion that profit making is the essence of democracy, the notion that economics is divorced from ethics, the notion that the only obligation of citizenship is consumerism, the notion that the welfare state is a pathology, that any form of dependency basically is disreputable and needs to be attacked, I mean, this is a vicious set of assumptions"

"The point is that despite the very real continuing abuses born of antisemitism, born of racism and sexism and homophobia, there are elected officials and other leaders who are female, Jewish, black or gay. There are none who are poor. There never have been, and there never will be. Every decade since society's inception has been witness to a holocaust of paupers, so enormous and perpetual that it has become wallpaper, unnoticed, unreported."