Marriner Eccles Quotes

The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources, talent, and labor power, the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority.

Having a decent share of the national wealth for the middle class is not bad for growth. It is actually useful both for equity and efficiency reasons.

No one should have more than five times the wealth of the poorest person.

When wealth is centralized, the people are dispersed. When wealth is distributed, the people are united.

The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.

The prosperity of merchants depends on the purchasing power of the mass of the people.

We have to stop allowing economics to be used as a trump card. Capitalism is like math. It is amoral. It is good at producing wealth; it's bad at distributing wealth. Unless it operates within a moral framework it will produce an unjust society.

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

This country is very good at creating wealth, but not very good at distributing it.

We propose in the following Treatise to give an outline of the Science which treats of the Nature, the Production, and the Distribution of Wealth. To that Science we give the name of Political Economy.

The system has for its object an increase of persons that are to intervene between the producer and the consumer, living on the product of the land and labour of others, diminishing the power of the first, and increasing the number of the last.

It is hard to redistribute wealth of there is no productive class producing it.

The prince should try to prevent too great an inequality of wealth .... prevent the wealth of the multitude from being hoarded by a few.

The concentration of income inside the United States is striking, but it pales in comparison with the concentration worldwide to which the economic system headed by the United States has given rise.

It is not the difficulty of the problem which we have; it is the fact that the rich people of this country -- and by rich people I mean the super-rich -- will not allow us to solve the problems, or rather the one little problem that is afflicting this country, because in order to cure all of our woes it is necessary to scale down the big fortunes, that we may scatter the wealth to be shared by all of the people.

Distribution of the wealth of the world is something for which no one sees a practical solution

The middle class is the engine of this economy.

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

The production of goods had become an end in itself and the consumption of goods only the means to further production.

The essence of the Industrial Revolution was the substitution of competition for the medieval regulations which had previously controlled the production and distribution of wealth.

Democracy really depends not only on not just having a middle class but having wealth distributed relatively evenly across the society so that people buy into the legitimacy of the system

Opulent, civilized, and industrious nations, are greater consumers than poor ones, because they are infinitely greater producers.

Since 2009, 95 percent of all gains in the economy went to the top 1 percent. That didn’t leave very much for the rest of us.

This growing inequality … is not only morally wrong, it’s bad economics, because when middle class families have less to spend, guess what. Businesses have fewer consumers.

Today, half of the national income goes to the richest 10 percent. In 2007, the top 1 percent controlled 34.6 percent of the wealth—significantly more than the bottom 90 percent who control just 26.9 percent.