Wealth

"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."

"When they give birth to a son, they put honey on his mouth and place glue in his palms so that when he grows up, he will speak sweet words and grasp coins in his hand as if they were glued there ...

They are good at trading, love profit, and go abroad at the age of twenty. They are everywhere profit is to be found."

                                       --Description of inhabitants of Samarkand from Chinese Chronicles

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.”

"You have to distinguish between two things |the economy and the stock market. The economy is the sum of all the goods and services that are produced in this country every day. There are telephones, cars, chickens and airplanes. That's the economy, and it's just as strong or weak today as it was a week ago."

"The Stock Exchange is something very different. There is no economy and no production of goods and services. There are only fantasies in which people from one hour to the next decide that this or that company is worth so many billions, more or less. It doesn't have a thing to do with reality or with the economy."

"It only means that a bunch of heavy speculators are now moving their shareholdings from companies here to German or Chinese ones. So it's the financial gnomes that some tough reporter should identify and expose as traitors. They're the ones who are systematically and perhaps deliberately damaging the economy in order to satisfy the profit interests of their clients."

                               --The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

"You see, the rich are different from you and me: they have more influence. It’s partly a matter of campaign contributions, but it’s also a matter of social pressure, since politicians spend a lot of time hanging out with the wealthy.

So when the rich face the prospect of paying an extra 3 or 4 percent of their income in taxes, politicians feel their pain - feel it much more acutely, it’s clear, than they feel the pain of families who are losing their jobs, their houses, and their hopes. And when the tax fight is over, one way or another, you can be sure that the people currently defending the incomes of the elite will go back to demanding cuts in Social Security and aid to the unemployed.

America must make hard choices, they’ll say; we all have to be willing to make sacrifices.

But when they say “we,” they mean “you.”

Sacrifice is for the little 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"

In the Story of Al Smith, the great reformist governor of New York, who gradually turned into a narrow-minded economic conservative and bitter critic of F.D.R. H. L. Mencken explained it thusly: “His association with the rich has apparently wobbled him and changed him. He has become a golf player.”

“The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class. Keep ‘em showin’ up at those jobs.”

"Behind every great fortune there is a crime."