Rick Perlstein Quotes

Privatization of assets that most of us consider public goods - like airports and highways - has a long, often-uncontroversial history.

Selling public property is the true Chicago way. Had Mr. Obama not been elected president, the nation's business journals would be falling over one another to praise his city for its daring, market-friendly innovations.

As it happens, Chicago is the nation's leader in municipal privatization efforts. That's right: The city that conservatives portray as the citadel of the power-grabbing, government-growing left has been selling itself off in pieces for years. It signed a 99-year lease for the Chicago Skyway, a toll road in the city's South Side, back in 2005.

I am absolutely a free marketeer and I believe the creation of wealth is a good thing and anyone who doesn't really needs to have their head examined - otherwise where are we going to get the schools, the roads, the universities, the third runway, dare I say it?

In various countries around the world, assets that had previously been in the hands of governments were sold off to the private sector in the hope that this would lead to a more efficient allocation, that these assets would be put to better use.

There are numerous issues that governments used to deal with that they now no longer deal with to the same extent: Prisons have been privatized in a number of countries; education and health are becoming privatized. Governments don't have the capacity to deliver - or not in isolation.

Take away the government's monopoly, and private groups will do it better.

We are a mixed economy. We will remain a mixed economy. The public and private sector will continue to play a very important role. The private sector in our country has very ample scope and I am confident that India's entrepreneurs have the capacity, and the will to rise to the occasion.

One of the things the government can't do is run anything. The only things our government runs are the post office and the railroads, and both of them are bankrupt.

When one gets in bed with government, one must expect the diseases it spreads.

There are very powerful and wealthy special interests who want to privatize or dismember virtually every function that government now performs, whether it is Social Security, Medicare, public education or the Postal Service.

We are a coalition government, and that limits our options in some ways. Privatization happens to be one such area.

All the actions of your government have been in favour of the markets, and against the people.

For a quarter-century, and changing only very recently, the main IMF prescription has been budgetary belt-tightening for patients much too poor to own belts. IMF led austerity has frequently resulted in riots, coups, and the collapse of public services.

The only winner in Privatization is Wall Street.

Most globalism opposition groups believe “that the foreign trade policy- making process was undemocratic and that it elevated global concerns over domestic ones.” Non-elected bureaucrats working largely behind closed doors were responsible for setting international trade rules that affected agriculture, services, trade-related investment measures, intellectual trade in goods; and over-saw a binding international dispute settlement process with little (if any) input from the domestic citizens and groups who would be affected by these economic rules and political mechanisms.

A provision for the sale of the vacant lands of the United States is particularly urged, among other reasons, by the important considerations that they are pledged as a fund for reimbursing the public debt; that if timely and judiciously applied they may save the necessity of burdening our citizens with new taxes for the extinguishment of the principal; and that being free to discharge the principal but in a limited proportion, no opportunity ought to be lost for availing the public of its right.

A few years ago nationalization was the solution to most of our problems. Now, and keep this to yourself, it is an utter flop.

Less Government in Business and More Business in Government

Evidence that has surfaced has cast a black cloud of distrust over our entire society. Our citizens do not know whom to believe, and many of them have concluded that all the processes of government have become so compromised that honest government has been rendered impossible.

History does not provide any example of capital accumulation brought about by a government. As far as governments invested in the construction of roads, railroads, and other useful public works, the capital needed was provided by the savings of individual citizens and borrowed by the government.

The America that boomed in the mid-20th century was a place where the state demanded that male citizens surrender years of their lives to national service, where the top income tax hovered between 70 and 94 percent, and where commercial banks were prohibited from investment banking. It was a veritable socialist paradise compared to the America of today.

I am in favour of disinvestment. But if a disinvested company has to tie up with a government company for its livelihood, there is a problem.

We should not have the U.S. government buying stock in American industries - the financial industry or any other industry.

Auctioning of natural resources such as spectrum, coal, oilfields, and land for commercial exploitation can largely substitute for tax impositions.