Paul Craig Roberts Quotes

It is economically irrational to exclude large environmental costs from the balance sheets of the producers and the consumers. You are only kidding yourself if you export those costs on to society as a whole.

What is truly frightening is that, despite our knowledge, we continue to subsidize activities without regard to their environmental—and economic—impact.

Environmental degradation has one cause above all others: the propensity of human beings to take the benefit and leave the costs to someone else, preferably someone far away in space or time, whose protests can be safely ignored.

Why would you invest in a company which is out of synch with the needs of society, that does not take its social compliance in its supply chain seriously, that does not think about the costs of externalities or of its negative impacts on society?

Taking on corporate greed is an environmental concern.

I have come to the conclusion that capitalism is successful primarily because it can impose the majority of the costs associated with its economic activities on outside parties and on the environment.

It seems that every time mankind is given a lot of energy, we go out and wreck something with it.

Businesses typically look at issues like price, quality, time of delivery. They don't often think about social and environmental impact because they're focused on their financial bottom line.

The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we're not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the U.S. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that eternality remains unpriced.

Like all animals, human beings have always taken what they want from nature. But we are the rogue species. We are unique in our ability to use resources on a scale and at a speed that our fellow species can't.

There isn't one thing the federal government does that anybody in Big Business would emulate, at least not in the profit sector.

Money and prices and markets don't give us exact information about how much our suburbs, freeways, and spandex cost. Instead, everything else is giving us accurate information: our beleaguered air and watersheds, our overworked soils, our decimated inner cities. All of these provide information our prices should be giving us but do not.

My business is hurting people.

And, in the past, it has been all too easy for legislators to load costs onto business in order to meet broader social goals. And costs for business means costs for consumers.

It's hardly surprising that the corporate aliens lie when it comes to the relationship between doing something about climate change and the economy.

For my very first movie, 'Roger and Me,' I made it as part of my deal with Warner Brothers that the four people that were evicted in that film, that Warner Brothers would house - would pay their mortgage or their rent for the next two years to give them a chance to get on their feet.

I pretty much believe, as everyone in the B Team does, that business must succeed beyond the bottom line. More important than profits is how you get to them. Measuring financial earnings and losses only is definitely not enough and has led us astray from creating a better world for all.

It took a generation for companies to recognise their responsibilities in terms of labour practices and another generation for them to recognise their environmental obligations.

When a business group tells us there is nothing wrong with the environment, naturally they may have good arguments, but we are also sceptical, because we know that they have an interest in these things.

Consumption may be regarded as negative production.

The Industrial Age is not sustainable. It's not sustainable in ecological terms, and it's not sustainable in human terms.

I often say that shareholders should feel very responsible for how responsive corporations are to the public trust.

Positive market incentives operating in the public interest are too few and far between, and are also up against a seemingly never-ending expansion of perverse incentives and lobbying.

The common liberal orthodoxy that living close to the land leads to eco-awareness is historically naive, considering that Mesopotamia, northern Africa, and the Mayan civilization were ruined by people who had lived there quite a long while.

Look at your business and the activities that you undertake. Then, start to think about not just your economic concerns, but about social and environmental impacts that businesses have.