David Harsanyi Quotes

Just as the financial crisis has created toxic assets and 'zombie' financial institutions, so has it transformed conservatism into a movement of the living dead.

Most of the mainstream coverage of most of the crisis - the economy, the road to get here, and the Tea Party - has been very much lacking.

I think if there's a great depression there might be some hope.

We're facing a natural disaster in the middle of an economic disaster. The federal government has to balance its budget the way our families do.

How much would you pay to avoid a second Depression?

The political ramifications of our festering financial and economic crisis have reached the sidewalks of New York, as well as other large and small cities across the US.

All of this talk of recession offends me. I am delighted that bankers have less money.

We certainly had an upheaval at the start of the Great Depression, and that resulted in a lot of financial reform, but it wasn't done in one stroke, and it wasn't done immediately. The Depression was in 1929 and resulted in the Securities and Exchange Act of '33, '34, '35, '37, '39, and '41.

The failure of Lehman Brothers demonstrated that liquidity provision by the Federal Reserve would not be sufficient to stop the crisis; substantial fiscal resources were necessary.

Redistribution of wealth would require enormous amounts of investment. The only time an elite has accepted this has been during crises, such as in America in the 1930s under Roosevelt.

Spain is facing an economic situation of extreme difficulty, I repeat, of extreme difficulty, and anyone who doesn't understand that is fooling themselves.

The global economy is spluttering back into life. The Tories would have left it to choke to death.

If you want to know what the biggest thing in your way to an improved standard of living, higher pay, a more rewarding career is: Barack Obama and the Democrat Party and their economic policies. They are the roadblock.

When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'

The Prime Minister in the UK thinks spending and borrowing more is the right thing to do in the circumstances, and is busily trying to bail out chunks of the private sector which would otherwise have to adjust more quickly to the painful reality that we have been living beyond our means.

I think one of the lessons of the Depression - and this is something that Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated - was that when orthodoxy fails, then you need to try new things. And he was very willing to try unorthodox approaches when the orthodox approach had shown that it was not adequate.

'Up in the Air' may be a glossy production sprinkled with laughter and sex, but it captures the distinctive topography of our Great Recession as vividly as a far more dour Hollywood product of 70 years ago, 'The Grapes of Wrath,' did the vastly different landscape of the Great Depression.

I have no doubt but that the misery of the lower classes will be found to abate whenever the Government assumes a freer aspect and the laws favor a subdivision of Property.

I had watched for many years and seen how a few rich families held much of Argentina's wealth and power in their hands. So Peron and the government brought in an eight hour working day, sickness pay and fair wages to give poor workers a fair go .

The world is still in deleveraging.

What I find so interesting is, Herbert Hoover in August 1928 said no country in the world was closer to abolishing poverty than the United States. And then, of course, we had the Great Depression.

The Tea Party grew out of indignation over the Wall Street bailout - an indignation shared by the vast majority of Americans. But the Tea Party ended up directing its ire at government rather than at big business and Wall Street.

Nationalization, unmentionable only yesterday, has entered common usage not least because an even scarier word - depression - is next on America's list to avoid.

Unemployment is sky-rocketing; deflation is in our future for the first time since the Great Depression. I don't care whose fault it is, it's the truth.

During the financial crisis and bailouts of 2008, it probably occurred to very few average people that we were entering a period of hardship for billionaires.