Chrystia Freeland Quotes

America’s super-elite has been particularly effective at using the tools of a political democracy to protect its minority privilege.

The relationship between the policy desires of the wealthiest 10 percent of the population and the actual Federal public policy over recent decades often corresponded to a plutocracy rather than a democracy.

Our politics has more than one kind of incumbent. There are the officeholders, and there are the people and corporations that have already made it in America, that want to protect and enlarge the advantages that they get from them.

Sadly, the system in this country is rigged in favor of wealthy elites who have purchased tremendous influence in our government.

Politicians are wonderful people as long as they stay away from things they don't understand, such as working for a living.

I don't think there could've been a pitch as crass as Trump's 'I can fix America because I'm rich' without that groundwork laid by Davos and the Clinton Global Initiative.

President Obama wants to increase the size of government and raise taxes, while I support less government and more individual freedom.

One could argue the GOP made no progress on limiting government in their four years of total control from 2002 to 2006. If anything, government expanded like never before.

America's corporate and political elites now form a regime of their own and they're privatizing democracy. All the benefits - the tax cuts, policies and rewards flow in one direction: up.

'Plutocracy.' It has a perfect nuance: chilly, inaccessible, icy-rich.

Money often determines not only who gets elected, but what gets done. Which voices do lawmakers listen to, the banks or home owners, coal companies, or asthma sufferers, the CEOs or the unemployed?

We love wealth, and we hate poor people. I know people who work in TV news who have actually been told to do stand-ups rather than put interviews with poor people on the air. We physically don't want to look at them.

I don't like gross monetary inequities. I firmly believe that the wrong people and the wrong professions are being rewarded, and rewarded absurdly, and that the hardest work the obscenely rich do is ensuring that they preserve their privileges, status symbols, and bloated bank accounts.

Listen friends, you have to face the truth: You are never going to be rich... The system is rigged in favor of the few, and your name is not among them, not now and not ever.

We need wealthy dogs off the seats of power. They're taking us back to feudalism and I really don't want that. But I'm very far from being a socialist.

Big government inevitably drives an upward distribution of wealth to those whose wealth, confidence and sophistication enable them to manipulate government.

Every society naturally divides itself into classes. The author of nature has bestowed on some greater capacities than on others--birth, education, talents and wealth, create distinctions among men as visible and of as much influence as titles, stars and garters. In every society, men of this class will command a superior degree of respect--and if the government is so constituted as to admit but few to exercise the powers of it, it will, according to the natural course of things, be in their hands.

There are two Americas. One which influences government and economic policy and the other which must live with the results.

The military budget got out of control and the tax cuts were helping the wealthy …. President Reagan was less and less interested in what I had to say

It is no accident that in America today the gap between the very rich and everyone else is wider than at any time since the Gilded Age. Now, as then, the titans are seeking an even greater political voice to match their economic power. Now, as then, the inevitable danger is that they will confuse their own self-interest with the common good.

Poor people don’t make campaign contributions.

Demanding that the rich get a tax cut as a condition for tax relief for others is simply elitist.

Tax cuts for the rich defund the critical public programs on which American families depend.

I really don't think we've become a plutocracy, but I worry about the enormous influence that money has in a democracy such as ours.

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.