Ha-Joon Chang Quotes

The history of business has shown that companies usually only regulate themselves if they're forced to by legislation, or out of self-interest - often in the shape of a marketable message that will help sell more products.

The notion that a business is clothed with a public interest and has been devoted to the public use is little more than a fiction intended to beautify what is disagreeable to the sufferers.

My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches, but I never believed it till now.

When do corporations begin to lose their credibility? They fought Social Security, Medicare, auto safety. They fought every social justice movement in this country.

We in America count on the profit motive to get people to do the right thing. That's our basic American notion when it comes to business.

Corporations are not capable of doing things out of the goodness of their hearts. They don’t have hearts.

Let’s put common decency ahead of corporate profits.

I do not dread these corporations as instruments of power to destroy this country, because there are a thousand agencies which can regulate, restrain and control them.

Regulation of private enterprise and not Government ownership or operation is the course rightly to be pursued in our relation to business.

The private sector can only be a supplement to the state and collective sectors, and it can never predominate.

That industries like coal and electric power, transport and banking, the supply of meat and the provision of houses, should be left to the hazards of private enterprise will appear as unthinkable to a future generation as it is unthinkable to our own that the army of the State should be left to private hands.... That does not mean direct operation by government .... It means the planning of constitutions for essential industries.

Leaders must be reminded that Businesses exist for the service of men.

If our great corporations would more scrupulously observe their legal limitations and duties, they would have less cause to complain of the unlawful limitations of their rights or of violent interference with their operations.

…in a just society, no one can ever be reduced to poverty or forced to beg.

It's appropriate for people to pursue their profit motive in business. If you want to change that, you're going against human nature. But when it comes to setting the rules or creating the institutions, then you should have the general interest at heart.

With deregulation, one sector of the economy after another is "liberated" to capital's unmonitored authority. The very notion that there is a public interest is contested…. Deregulation has been, above all else, a means of reducing corporate business's accountability to the public.

The existence of a free market does not of course eliminate the need for government. On the contrary, government is essential both as a forum and for determining the “rules of the game”.

Capitalism with airbags—the type of capitalism I am a fan of.

The pendulum of capitalism has swung way too far to only trying to maximize the profit of shareholders rather than many of the traditional other virtues and accomplishments of a company.

… governments must serve capitalism by establishing and maintain a framework which enables capitalism to develop. It can induce it to grow, but cannot command it to do so.

We need new laws to rein in the forces of greed and to curb those ingenious legal advisors of the holders of vast corporate wealth.

I suppose I am a conservative where business is concerned, and a liberal with regard to people.

The politics of Nazi Germany should not be considered the business of the management of General Motors. We must conduct ourselves [in Germany] as a German organization. We have no right to shut down the plant.

I think it's a completely good thing to want to do business, to want to make money and be a success in the marketplace, to get the attention of customers. I'm not in the business of pointing fingers or blaming companies, but there is a limit to everything.

You can't just let companies self-regulate, and I've gotta think they get that, too.