I recently read “The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It” by Robert B. Reich. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. If you like them, buy the book.
“Forget the old idea that corporations succeed by becoming better, cheaper, or faster than their competitors. They now succeed mainly by increasing their monopoly power.” (8)
“adjusted for inflation, CEO pay increased 940 percent, but the typical worker’s pay increased 12 percent. In the 1960s, the typical CEO of a large American company earned about twenty times as much as the typical worker; by 2019, the CEO earned three hundred times as much.” (15)
“the share of total wealth held by the richest o.1 percent-about 160,000 American households—went from less than 10 percent to 20 percent over the last four decades. They now own almost as much wealth as the bottom 9o percent of households combined. The entire bottom half of America now owns just 1.3 percent. The only other country with similarly high levels of wealth concentration is Russia.” (15)
“People with the most to lose from genuine social change have put themselves in charge of social change.” (29)
“All of the nation’s unions together spend about $48 million annually on lobbying in Washington. Corporate America spends $3 billion.” (56)
“In the 1970s, only about 3 percent of retiring members of Congress went on to become Washington lobbyists. In recent years, fully half of all retiring senators and 42 percent of retiring representatives have turned to lobbying, regardless of party affiliation.” (59)
“Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty.” -Henry Demarest Lloyd (113)
“Reformer Mary Lease charged, “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street and for Wall Street”” (114)
“President Woodrow Wilson explained the danger of excessive economic and political power in his 1913 book, The New Freedom: “I do not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.”” (115)
“The single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power,” counsels Warren Buffett, America’s second wealthiest man, whose net worth as of July 2019 was $84.4 billion. Buffett’s most important investment criterion isn’t productivity, product quality, or innovation.
He says it’s “the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor.”” (116)
“Payrolls are typically 70 percent of a corporation’s costs.” (118)
“As I’ve said, the economy doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game in which winners do better only to the extent losers do worse. But power is necessarily a zero-sum game. Certain people possess it only to the extent other people don’t. Some people gain it only when others lose it. The connection between the economy and power is critical. As power has concentrated in the hands of a few, those few have grabbed nearly all the economic gains for themselves.” (139)
“Through it all, Americans have clung to the meritocratic tautology that individuals are paid what they’re worth in the market, without examining changes in the legal and political institutions that define the market. This tautology is easily confused with a moral claim that people deserve what they are paid. Yet this claim is meaningful only if the system’s legal and political institutions are morally just.” (140)
“Since 1982, the combined wealth of these three families (Koch, Walmart, Mars candy) has grown nearly 6,000 percent, adjusted for inflation. Over the same period, the typical household’s wealth dropped 3 percent. (141)
“The Walmart heirs alone have more wealth than the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined.” (141)
“Harold Arena says, “I think they overregulate the bottom because it’s harder to regulate the top.”” (159)
“Decades ago, a general election was like a competition between two hot-dog vendors on a long boardwalk extending from the right to the left. Each had to move to the middle to maximize sales. If one strayed too far left or too far right, the other would move beside him and take all sales from the rest of the boardwalk.” (165)
“This is why oligarchies depend on ways other than brute force to hold power. The three most common are: (1) systems of belief-religions, dogmas, and ideologies- intended to convince most people of the righteousness of the oligarchy’s claim to power; (2) bribes to the most influential people to gain their support and thereby legitimize the oligarchy; and (3) manufactured threats-supposed foreign enemies or “enemies within,” as well as immigrants and minority populations-to divert attention from the oligarchy so the diverse elements within the majority won’t join together against it.
Today’s American oligarchy deploys all three.” (166-167)
“People deserve whatever they earn in the market. Income and wealth are measures of worth. If you amass a billion dollars, then you must deserve it because that’s what the market awarded you. If you barely scrape by, then you have only yourself to blame.” (168)
“One of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” -John Kenneth Galbraith (174)
“Many of them are socially liberal. They favor diversity and indusion, equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians, transgender bathrooms, and a woman’s right to choose. They want more women, blacks, and Latinos on corporate boards, in executive suites, and as members of Congress. Most resolutely disapprove of racism, white privilege, misogyny, and zenophobia in America. They worry about the destruction of the environment. But they avoid questions of class and power like the plague. Personal issues of identity are on the table, but the system is not.” (176)
Liked the quotes? Buy the book here.
