Hjalmar Schacht Quotes

Capitalism requires individual responsibility and accountability. People are seen as atomized units in a capitalist system - they are either useful, or they are not. They are not seen racially or ethnically or religiously. They consume and they produce, and those are their only relevant characteristics.

In this view, the role of the great majority of Americans is simply to buy the products produced, work happily for their wages, and leave all of the significant economic decisions to the capitalists.

I love the way capitalism finds a place - even for its enemies.

There's a small amount of super-wealthy people that want to maintain their billions and billions of dollars. Those are the people who are really making the decisions.

The diversification of the people's demand could not be followed by the state apparatus.

If capital and labor ever do get together it's good night for the rest of us.

We hear of the wealth of nations, of the powers of production, of the demand and supply of markets, and we forget that these words mean no more, if they mean any thing, then the happiness, and the labor, and the necessities of men.

The difficulty lies, not in finding a producer, but in finding a consumer.

Those who control the wealth of this society have an influence over political life far in excess of their number.

Capitalism is not simply mass production, but mass production to satisfy the needs of the masses.

Those underlings who in all the preceding ages of history had formed the herds of slaves and serfs, of paupers and beggars, became the buying public, for whose favor the businessmen canvass. They are the customers who are “always right,” the patrons who have the power to make poor suppliers rich and rich suppliers poor.

The struggle for power in our day lies not between Crown and people, or between a caste of nobles and a bourgeoisie, but between the classes who have property and the classes who have none.

To assign to everybody his proper place in society is the task of the consumers. Their buying and abstention from buying is instrumental in determining each individual's social position.

The Tory approach depended on benefits trickling down from a process that inevitably strengthened the already strong.

What is “destructive competition” for producers is a bargain bonanza for consumers.

The ideology and practice of individual acquisition, accumulation and concentration are now ascendant

There are two forces in this and in every other nation of the world today. One force is the taker and the other force is the maker.

What did the workers and peasants gain when power passed from the kings and nobles to the bankers and manufacturers?

The unfettered free market has been the most radically disruptive force in American life in the last generation.

This contempt for money is a trick developed by the rich to keep the poor without it.

What we call Monopoly is Business at the end of its journey. The concentration of wealth, the wiping out of the middle classes, are other names for it. To get it is, in the world of affairs, the chief end of man.

Wherever the dominant culture is, that’s where the money goes.

The capitalist engine is first and last an engine of mass production which unavoidably means also production for the masses.

Prediction of whether or not the capitalist order will survive is, in part, a matter of terminology.

The state has an active role to play in ensuring that there is equilibrium between the constituent parts of the economy, the consumers and the producers.