Henry Demarest Lloyd Quotes

What we call Monopoly is Business at the end of its journey. The concentration of wealth, the wiping out of the middle classes, are other names for it. To get it is, in the world of affairs, the chief end of man.

That's what we were doing for the last twenty years, telling everybody to adopt a raw capitalism with no safety nets, no redistributive mechanisms…. I think we have to find ways to spread the benefits of global markets beyond just the small group of market-dominant minorities and foreign investors. We need to find ways to redistribute the wealth, whether it's property title and giving poor people property, land reform.... Redistributive mechanisms are tough to have if you have so much corruption.

I had made a great deal of money, and I was proud of it. I was a capitalist.

Money trumps peace sometimes. There are a lot of very powerful commercial interests around the world.

Free trade would place our farmers and workers in competition with peasant and sweated labor products.

I am not a free trader. I am not a free trader. I believe an American worker who has worked hard and played by the rules should be rewarded. I don't believe that companies who take their jobs overseas should be rewarded with tax breaks.

In this new market ...billions can flow in or out of an economy in seconds. So powerful has this force of money become that some observers now see the hot-money set becoming a sort of shadow world government -- one that is irretrievably eroding the concept of the sovereign powers of a nation state.

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

Capitalism without capital is just an ism.

Trade will no longer lie at the mercy of ignorant and reckless politicians, or at the mercy, no less to be deprecated, of a few purse-proud, domineering, dictatorial bank directors, who care not what mischief they do if they can but perpetuate their own exclusive privileges.

Out of this modern civilization, economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital - all undreamed of by the Fathers - the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.

Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.

The building of the transcontinental railroads resulted in an orgy of political corruption. The public lands and the natural resources of coal, of iron, and of timber were lavishly wasted in the great scramble for wealth and material power. The carnival of waste and plunder reached its climax about 1890. Evidences were abundant that the great business interests of the country were controlling the government for their own private benefit. The capitalists who financed the railroads, mines, mills, packing houses, grain elevators, and other great enterprises, received from Congress favors which destroyed competition and enormously increased private fortunes.

Capitalists are generating death.

The capitalist free market is a marvelous servant but a disastrous master. In one of the greatest achievements of the second half of this [the 20th] century, a few favored societies learned to convert it from master to servant. The danger now is that a smug and vainglorious capitalism will not remember the lesson.

Theodore Roosevelt understood that unregulated monopoly could pose an even greater threat than unrestrained government.

From the end of WWI to today, American economic might would be the decisive factor in the shaping of the world order.

Politicians make the claim that our government has helped multinationals globalize and that businesses that globalize are somehow 'crony capitalists.' This is hogwash.

Corporations and financiers have used their growing influence to induce governments and international organizations to construct a global framework of institutions and regulations that enable elites to maximize their rental income.

Brexit and Trump have brought the problems of capitalism into sharp relief, but both are only making things worse. Take the investment challenge - businesses invest where there they see technological or market opportunity.

Markets, when left to themselves, can sort of slip into being just the private property of big businesses and cartels, meeting the needs of some businesses and not the needs of customers.

In 10 years, ... you're going to see the most valuable economy in the world -- the largest economy in the world -- is going to be a country run by communists. The Chinese seem to be very good at capitalism. And this is going to have fundamental problems and present an identity crisis for the United States. Because for a long time, free markets coincided with liberties such as free speech, free press, free religion. And all of a sudden, this equation is going to be decoupled. And when it gets decoupled, we might find that democracy, the multitude of voices, actually impedes capitalism because a state that does not have any pretense of limited government can very quickly mandate a regulatory framework for drones, for electric cars, for self-driving cars, for any new innovation where they feel that they can leapfrog Western societies. And this is a very unique thing in the American experience. And this is why it's very important to think of American capitalism as an operating system and not as an ideology. Because when you think about it as an ideology, you can have good politics make for very, very bad policy. That market outcomes and democratic voices and battles for votes can end up stifling progress.

The theory of communism is that the government takes money from the haves to help the have-nots; the reality is the government helps itself. In capitalistic America, four of the five richest counties surround Washington, D.C. If we were communists, it would be five.

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.

I'm the catalyst for the downfall of the Blairites, the Clintonites, the Bushites, and all these dreadful people who work hand in glove with Goldman Sachs and everybody else, have made themselves rich, and ruined our countries. I couldn't be happier.