Noam Chomsky Quotes

The obvious one, in a market system, in a really functioning one, whoever's making the decisions doesn't pay attention to what are called externalities, effects on others. I sell you a car, if our eyes are open we'll make a good deal for ourselves but we're not asking how it's going to affect her [over there.] It will, there'll be more congestion, gas prices will go up, there will be environmental effects and that multiplies over the whole population. Well, that's very serious.

I have come to the conclusion that capitalism is successful primarily because it can impose the majority of the costs associated with its economic activities on outside parties and on the environment.

You show me pollution and I will show you people who are not paying their own way, people who are stealing from the public, people who are getting the public to pay their costs of production. All environmental pollution is a subsidy.

Markets are lethal, if only because of ignoring externalities, the impacts of their transactions on the environment.

No major technological change has ever been instituted by mankind without an array of negative consequences. The motor car has meant liberation for millions, but it has also caused congestion, environmental damage, and a disturbing death toll on the roads.

Few, if any, corporations absorb the full cost of their operations. Corporations shove many of their costs onto the environment, the public sector, and distant third parties.

What polluters do is raise the standards of living for themselves, while lowering the quality of living for everybody else, and they do that by escaping the disciplines of the free market.

Climate change represents the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen

"Free markets" is a very general term. There are all sorts of problems that will emerge. Free markets work best when the transaction between two individuals affects only those individuals. Most often, a transaction between you and me affects a third party. That is the source of all problems for government. That is the source of all pollution problems, of the inequality problem. This reality ensures that the end of history will never come.

It is economically irrational to exclude large environmental costs from the balance sheets of the producers and the consumers. You are only kidding yourself if you export those costs on to society as a whole.

Everywhere I go I see increasing evidence of people swirling about in a human cesspit of their own making.

The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we're not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the U.S. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that eternality remains unpriced.

Everybody knows that the industrialized nations are the worst offenders.

Perhaps it has been too uncomfortable for those with vested interests to acknowledge, but we have spent the best part of the past century enthusiastically testing the world to utter destruction; not looking closely enough at the long-term impact our actions will have.

The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them.

Money and prices and markets don't give us exact information about how much our suburbs, freeways, and spandex cost. Instead, everything else is giving us accurate information: our beleaguered air and watersheds, our overworked soils, our decimated inner cities. All of these provide information our prices should be giving us but do not.

If I buy a car, I use the car, you don't, and the market for cars works pretty well. But there are many other sorts of goods, often very important goods, which are not provided well through the market. Often, these go under the heading of public goods.

There's no longer any surprise in noting that China has grave environmental problems.

Resources are being destroyed, and if you don't have resources, you can't do business.

The city needs a car like a fish needs a bicycle.

If all the cars in the United States were placed end to end, it would probably be Labor Day Weekend.

Putting the market before the society is an invitation to trouble and disappointment.

The oil market is the biggest failure of the free market because it did not take into account the environmental damage.

We have been proud of our industrial achievements, but we have not hitherto stopped thoughtfully enough to count the human cost

Environmental degradation and pollution constrain economic growth, contribute to large-scale migration, harm public health, and engender social unrest.