Paul Craig Roberts Quotes

Everything that everyone is afraid of has already happened: The fragility of capitalism, which we don't want to admit; the loss of the empire of the United States; and American exceptionalism. In fact, American exceptionalism is that we are exceptionally backward in about fifteen different categories, from education to infrastructure.

Technology has changed things, same as everywhere. But the economy has changed drastically. When Jamaica first won independence, our dollar was stronger than the U.S. dollar. Now ours is about 90 to one. That's had a big impact on crime and poverty.

I think the collision between the First and Third world is going to become more and more conspicuous. It's the big cliff that we've all got to climb.

The countries of the Middle East have been losers in the age of globalization, out of step in an age of free markets, free trade, and democratic politics.

Whenever a Third World country accepts a structural adjustment loan and hence the imposition of a structural adjustment program, it has in effect delegated the task of running its economy to a foreign, non-elected body sitting in Washington DC.

Global poverty is a powder keg ignitable by our own indifference.

Politicians haven't the capacity to lead whole societies anywhere. They are outclassed and outrun by trends in the world economy that are beyond the ability of the political class to control or direct.

Wild globalization has helped some people much, but has hurt most.

I don't believe that killing the French model in order to become the U.K. or the United States overnight is the solution. You have a big debate on inequality there, and for our society, a lot of inequality would not be bearable.

If the U.S. is the richest country in the world, why is it also the most unequal?

Wars in general, and civil wars to a greater degree, have the effect of exacerbating class tensions, because the sacrifices of war are always distributed unequally, and the poor are hit hardest.

Abroad, technological change will create even more disruption as the wave of acceleration engulfs societies that have not yet come to terms with the social demands of industrialization, let alone more recent technological change. Mass disorientation can become the source of both national aggression and non-state terrorism—aggression and terrorism made all the more devastating by access to weapons that are not only increasingly powerful but also deployable by ever smaller groups.

We cannot continue to have the upper class wealty getting richer and richer, the middle class shrinking and 43 million living in poverty.

The people are rejecting so-called free trade and globalization that the elites presented as a positive thing.

Today, if you were raised poor, you're just as likely to stay poor as you were 50 years ago.

The welfare state is collapsing all around us. There are people that realize that we can't go on this way, but I'm not sure how many people realize how close we are to the collapse of the U.S. financial system.

Greece has been, in many ways, a partially dysfunctional society. For example, the wealthy barely pay taxes... to an extent, that's true elsewhere, including the United States, but it's been pretty extreme in Greece.

The trends that are shaping the twenty-first-century world embody both promise and peril. Globalization, for example, has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty while contributing to social fragmentation and a massive increase in inequality, not to mention serious environmental damage.

There is growing inequality. The families of the all-powerful Ministers are getting richer. The poor and hard-working Belizeans are getting poorer.

The poorest country in South America, Bolivia, had been devastated by neoliberal economic policies.

The privileged elites are part of the globalization moment that we live in.

We are in a world where globalization, which is an ideology, has forgotten and put aside the people, the people's interests, aspirations, and dreams.

It's true that globalization, with all its fantastic improvements in the world and the technological progress linked to it, has increased inequality at country level, especially inside countries. And there are people that were left behind - people, sectors, regions - that has created a sense of frustration in the rust belts of the world.

As capitalism falters, the rich move their money out of the country, violence increases, and politicians promising prosperity are elected.

The capitalist model, the developed model, the consumer model which comes from the North, which it has forced on the world, is falling apart on Earth, and there is no planet nearby that we can emigrate to.