Rebecca Solnit Quotes

Big corporations are all to be nationalized.

You see, another reason for nationalization was that private ownership meant fragmentation.

All of Africa's resources should be declared resources of the state and managed by the nation. Our experience in Bolivia shows that when you take control of natural resources for the people of the town and village, major world change is possible.

I do not believe in government ownership of anything which can with propriety be left in private hands, and in particular I should most strenuously object to government ownership of railroads. In my judgment public ownership of railroads is highly undesirable and would probably in this country entail far-reaching disaster.

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.

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.

More and more it is evident that the State and if necessary the Nation, has got to possess the right of supervision and control as regards the great corporations.

When everyone owns something, in reality nobody owns it. Control then occurs merely by the whims of the politicians in power.

Private enterprise is ceasing to be free enterprise.

I don't believe government should take over, you know, the grocery store down the street or own the means of production.

Capitalism means free enterprise, sovereignty of the consumers in economic matters, and sovereignty of the voters in political matters. Socialism means full government control of every sphere of the individuals life and the unrestricted supremacy of the government in its capacity as central board of production management.

The left must shelve its centralist megalomania and drop the obsessive conviction that the State can effectively control the whole economy … The left must stand up for consumer rights, free investment decisions, the free disposal of assets, and a decentralized decision making process

A due regard for individual property rights does not preclude assigning the state its share in national resources.

The Republican approach would compel the trusts to conduct their business in a lawful manner while [William Jennings] Bryan and the Democrats would destroy the entire business in order to stamp out the evils which they have practiced.

You have to believe that a woman cannot be trusted with decisions about her own body, but that large multi-national corporations can make decisions affecting all mankind with no regulation whatsoever.

Government intervention only hurts; it doesn't help.

The state knows best how to protect resources.

The institution of private property... is undergoing, at this time, a strain never put on it before. Not because the corporation, in essence, is retrogressive or unrepublican, but because in fact, it is unrepublican, and for that reason retrogressive also.

Only government can cause inflation, preserve monopoly, and punish enterprise.

Economics and politics are so intertwined and interlinked that politics now, mainstream politics, extreme center politics, are little else but a version of concentrated economics. And this means that any alternative - alternative capitalism, left Keynesianism, intervention by the state to help the poor, rolling back the privatizations - becomes a huge issue. The entire weight of the extreme center and its media is turned against it, which in reality now is beginning to harm democracy.

One of the reasons that I am in favor of less government is because when you have more government, industrialists take it over.

Governments don't control things. A government can't control the economy without controlling people.

Unless the power of the corporation can be organized on an accepted principle of legitimacy, it will be taken over by a Central government

The fascist state is the corporate state.

A 'mixed economy' is a society in the process of committing suicide.