Noreena Hertz Quotes

Government has a role as well in what is referred to as redistributive justice.

A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.

Socialism is about claims of justice, and it is also about money: about wealth, income, physical and financial capital. It is an ideology based on allocating economic resources. It may try to achieve that goal by nationalizing assets, by command-and-control regulation, or by taxation and redistribution.

A rich man told me recently that a liberal is a man who tells other people what to do with their money.

There is nothing inherently fair about equalizing incomes. If the government penalizes you for working harder than somebody else, that is unfair. If you save your money but retire with the same pension as a free-spending neighbor, that is also unfair.

At the end of the day, philanthropy can only ever be an adjunct to what governments provide. And government coffers need to be replenished.

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more.

Government health care changes the relationship between the citizen and the state, and, in fact, I think it's an assault on citizenship.

To me, politics is an extension of what I do in medicine.

While lawmakers should eschew soaking the rich, that is no excuse for soaking the poor.

As Justice gives every Man a Title to the product of his honest industry, and the fair Acquisitions of his Ancestors descended to him; so Charity gives every Man a Title to so much out of another’s plenty, as will keep him from extreme want, where he has no means to subsist otherwise.

Our America is an America where human needs come before human greed.

The time has come for an all-out war against poverty. The rich nations must use their vast resources of wealth to develop the underdeveloped, school the unschooled, and feed the unfed. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for "the least of these".

If the money is raised by taxation, then the burden will fall where it ought to fall, . . . and the rich and stingy will no longer be able to evade the duties of citizenship and of humanity.

Charity is a cold grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim.

The trick is figuring out how do we structure government systems that pool resources, and hence facilitate some [wealth] redistribution, because I actually believe in redistribution, at least at a certain level, to make sure that everybody's got a shot.

Among the many other questions raised by the nebulous concept of “greed” is why it is a term applied almost exclusively to those who want to earn more money or to keep what they have already earned—never to those wanting to take other people’s money in taxes or to those wishing to live on the largesse dispensed from such taxation. No amount of taxation is ever described as “greed” on the part of government or the clientele of government.

But without a caring society, without each citizen voluntarily accepting the weight of responsibility, government is destined to grow even larger, taking more of your money, burrowing deeper into your lives.

My message to David Cameron, as the head of our government, is to seriously think again about this Robin Hood tax, the tax to help the poor by taking a little bit from the rich.

Spreading the wealth punishes success while setting America on course for a greater dependency on government.

Any health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized and humane must - must - redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent healthcare is by definition re-distributional.

I think that people who make a lot of money - and I do - should certainly give a considerable amount of it away.

A lot of people are happy to give money to charities but are wary of giving through taxes because they feel it doesn't produce any value.

If we really just wanted to focus on making money, the first billion people who are already on Facebook have way more money than the next five or six billion people combined. It's not fair, but it's the way that it is. And, we just believe that everyone deserves to be connected, and on the Internet, so we're putting a lot of energy towards this.

If it is wrong for you to take money from someone else who earned it, to take their money by force for your own needs, then it is certainly just as wrong for you to demand that the government step forward and do this dirty work for you.