Quotes / Privately Owned Society

"We've given it a fair chance, it's failed, and now the private sector will have to swoop in to fix it. If you privatize the legislature, I can assure you it'll be humming efficiently and in the black by this time next year!"

— An economic analyst, NationStates issue #294

"Dr. Evil, I spent 30 years of my life turning this two-bit evil empire into a world class multinational. I was going to have a cover story in Forbes, but you, like an idiot, wanted to Take Over the World. And you don't realize there is no "world" anymore! It's only corporations!"

— Number Two, Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery

We are free today substantially but the day will come when our Republic will be an impossibility. It will be an impossibility because wealth will be concentrated in the hands of a few.

—James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution"

The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself... Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.

—Franklin D. Roosevelt

Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

—Henry A. Wallace

Trickle-down theory was in fact an economic theory dredged up from the dustbin of history originally called 'horse-and-sparrow theory.' It was postulated thusly: 'If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.' Translation: 'Eat Shit' Economics.

—Rational Wiki

[T]he world is dividing into two blocs — plutonomy and the rest.

—Citibank' memo, "Plutonomy; Buying Luxury, Explaining Social Imbalances"

The perfect plutocracy consists of two classes only—the plutocrats and their overseers and the subsistence-level poor. The degree of economic inequality is staggering as is the low level of social mobility. Although the word plutocracy has disappeared from some modern dictionaries, as if it no longer exists, it is in fact the only name to correctly describe many modern governments.

—Urban Dictionary

Without quite realizing it, over the past three decades, we have drifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society, a society where just about everything is up for sale.

—Michael Sandel

States grow increasingly reliant on business, to the point where they no longer know what to do without its advice...government is no more responsible for the delivery of services than Nike is for making the shoes that it brands.

—Henry Farrell, "On Post-Democracy"

In 20 years, the city will have a floating monorail that costs $100 per ride, and you'll be allowed to spit on the poor as you blow by them. It hasn't just become New York, it has become an alien mutation of New York. The average apartment is the size of a safe deposit box and carries a $5,000 monthly rent. We're five years away from San Francisco being completely depopulated simply because hedge fund managers gobbled up so much real estate as assets and not for actual living quarters. It'll be the anti-matter Detroit.

—Drew Magary, "Why Your Team Sucks 2014: San Francisco 49ers."

The bottom 70 percent or so are virtually disenfranchised; they have almost no influence on policy, and as you move up the scale you get more influence. At the very top, you basically run the show.

—Noam Chomsky

In neo-liberal times, the idea of good government has changed dramatically from the defence of the poor and the weak, to success in attracting large business investment. In this new imagination of government, cultivating the company of the super-rich is no longer perceived to be corruption but is, instead, nation-building.

—Harsh Mander, "End of Idealism"

I'm beginning to wonder just what role science and technology will play in the future, given the reemergence of brute force as a major factor in world politics, a reality that I don't recall seeing in many premillennial forecasts. We've been sold the inevitability of a technocratic future but technocrats are remarkably indifferent to the great majority of the population. At some point the people who aren't invited to the party will realize they've just been looking in on it through a two-way mirror...Hungry people are the same everywhere.

—Christopher Loring Knowles

The words "individual rights", in a civil-society context, are often Libertarian-ese for "business". That's what what they derive as the inevitable meaning of rights and freedom....the whopper of "right to have the State back up business". That's a wild definition of freedom.

—Seth Finkelstein, "Libertarianism Make You Stupid"

As Greece and other nations have teetered on the edge of insolvency and the EU has demanded austerity, their citizens have rightly sensed that they are losing control over their collective destinies. But this is also true of the restless German public, which worries that it has signed an economic suicide pact...The EU then points to the omniscient financial markets, which refer you to American bond-rating agencies, which are staffed by MBAs working in cubicles who have become, faute de mieux, the new sovereigns of Europe.

—Mark Lilla, "The Libertarian Age"

With a weakened support structure and vanishing tribal guideposts, the individual has felt so helpless that at every level, there is constant clamor for “leadership.” In no other Western society is there such adulation of the strong-jawed decisive CEO. It is the “fuhrer prinzip” of Nazi Germany all over again, ready to take over when market forces finally spin the economy out of control.

—Charles Maechling, "The Next Century — Can the Free Market Be Saved?'

“Welcome to Equifax Stadium. That’ll be $5,980 for a beer, please.” Keep in mind that the Falcons didn’t even NEED this stadium, because the Georgia Dome is barely two decades old. But because this is the NFL, and because Arthur Blank is a fucking crook, you get $1.4 billion spent on Megatron’s butthole.◊ The roof really makes it...a roof that actually simulates human peristalsis. All this in a city that has one working snowplow. Truly, we live in a blessed age.

—Drew Magary

The Olympics are a vile spectacle. Corporate greed given special laws to facilitate their profits at the expense of public funds, followed by an extended exercise in nationalism with deeply disturbing militaristic aspects such as the installation of fucking missile batteries on the top of council homes just in case they needed to shoot a plane out of the sky or something, because obviously nothing goes wrong if you shoot a plane out of the sky over a major metropolitan area. Ooh, and the helicopter-based snipers! Those were great too.

—Dr. El Sandifer on the 2012 Olympics

"Privatize everything, privatize the sea and the sky, privatize the water and the air, privatize justice and the law, privatize the passing cloud, privatize the dream, especially if it's during the day and open eyed. And finally, for the embellishment of so many privatizations, privatize the States, surrender once and for all their exploitation to private companies through international share offering. There lies the salvation of the world... and, while you're at it, privatize your whore mothers."

—José Saramago, Cadernos de Lanzarote (1994)

The Corporation Rim has always been a slave state, though it calls its institutionalized slavery "contract labor."

— The Murderbot Diaries, "Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory"

Welcome to Ancapistan, where every man can be a King. Welcome to Ancapistan, where your worth as a man is the worth that you bring.

— Jreg, "Ancapistan"

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