Joseph Stiglitz Quotes

Politics is just a function of business now, just a tributary of the great entrepreneurial capitalist system.

The two great aims of industrialism - replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy - seem close to fulfillment.

I'm not overly alarmist about it, but I do think there are some worrying signs, like the growing accumulation of wealth by a very small proportion of the population, plus elections in the US are much more dominated by money than anywhere else calling itself a democracy.

Middle-class democracy has proved the best camouflage of the political dominance of big capital.

When great wealth collects the way it has in the last two decades, it develops an arrogance…. You see it in the development of a survival of the fittest philosophy, one that says markets are more important than democracy.

This notion that borders wouldn't matter, that we would have commonality of interests around the world. Well, guess who got there first? The plutocrats.

Plutocracy too long tolerated leaves democracy on the auction block, subject to the highest bidder.

The dominant economic approach of the last thirty years is now on its last legs. Letting the market rip and an indifference to inequality are now seen as important causes of the greatest economic crash since the 1930s.

There's one political party in this country, and that's the corporate party.

Patrimonial capitalism's legacy is that many people see reform as a euphemism for corruption and self-dealing.

There is no reason that billionaires should crowd us out from our democracy.

In our political system, money is power. And that means a few can have a lot more power than the rest. That's bad news for everyone else - and for our democracy itself.

I remember an article, I can't recall who by, it was after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which said that now the Wall was down, there could be no more class war. Only someone with money could ever say such a thing.

Market forces and capitalism by themselves aren't sufficient to ensure the common good and to limit the concentration of wealth at levels that are compatible with democratic ideals.

Maybe, just maybe, something is wrong when the greatest part of new money earned in our country goes to the top 1 percent.... There is something profoundly wrong then the millionaires and billionaires are running the politics of our country.... When billionaires are buying elections, that is not democracy.

Perhaps the greatest threat to freedom and democracy in the world today comes from the formation of unholy alliances between government and business. This is not a new phenomenon. It used to be called fascism... .The outward appearances of the democratic process are observed, but the powers of the state are diverted to the benefit of private interests.

Many will see [globalization] as little more than a mask used by certain economic elites for taking away the voice of the individual citizen.

But the most common and durable source of faction [political parties] has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.

Finance capital curtails democratic rights, narrowing the scope of democracy and paving the way for the open and violent dictatorship of fascist rule.

Free markets were supposed to lead to free societies. Instead, today’s supercharged global economy is eroding the power of the people in democracies around the globe. Welcome to a world where the bottom line trumps the common good and government takes a back seat to big business.

… there is inherent in the dynamics of capitalism a natural and destabilizing tendency toward inequality of income, wealth and opportunity.

The rich are hijacking American democracy.

Plutocrats were the chief beneficiaries of so-called neoliberalism and the suite of political changes it brought beginning in the late 1970s - deregulation, weaker protection for unions, the shareholder value movement, and the subsequent inflation of executive compensation.

Either you support the existing global elite, or you want real change and believe in nation-state democracy.

People have been savaged by a predatory economic and political system, and some are turning to Trump. Unfortunately, Trump is just more of the same.