Yaron Ezrahi Quotes

The American polity is infected with a serious imbalance of power between elites and masses, a power which is the principal threat to our democracy.

Free markets were supposed to lead to free societies. Instead, today’s supercharged global economy is eroding the power of the people in democracies around the globe. Welcome to a world where the bottom line trumps the common good and government takes a back seat to big business.

Capitalism is very undemocratic. Capitalism gives you power according to your wealth while democracy gives you power according to your existence.

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.

When money is controlled by a few it gives that few an undue power and control over labor and the resources of the country. Labor will have its best return when the laborer can control its disposal.

Liberals are concerned about the concentration of wealth because it almost inevitably leads to a concentration of power that undermines democracy.

A lot of people are deeply dissatisfied by the diminishing control they have over their lives, because of the way our system of government is set up, to cater to the powerful, cater to the wealthy, cater to the corporations, and not to the individual American citizen.

We know that social exclusion is closely tied to the new economic world order, globalized, with free and open markets, which isn't bringing prosperity or social justice to all.

Antimarket, antiglobalist posture resounds among the people, because the people are afraid.

…national wealth, especially when carefully accumulated in the hands of a few individuals, is dangerous in the extreme to human liberty.

Although the ideal of free enterprise could, indeed, lend itself to the uplifting of the human condition, when it is practiced for profit alone, it becomes but a license for the powerful to further enslave the weak.

The presumed causes of Americas troubles can be summed up simply: the evils of unlimited competition, and abuses by those with economic power.

Controlling capitalism has proved far more difficult than controlling anything else, because capitalism is based on the control of the many by the few—the reverse of the conventional definition of political democracy.

Liberty is impossible if 36 thousand families at the top of the economic pyramid get as much income as 12 million families at the bottom.

Neoliberalism is hard to define. It could refer to intensified resource extraction, financialization, austerity, or something more ephemeral - a way of life - in which collective ideals of citizenship give way to marketized individualism and consumerism.

The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.

In hip-hop, as in neoliberalism, economics bullied politics out of the picture.

The concentration of wealth in the hands of the few threatens the ability of ordinary people to raise their voices and have a say over how our societies are run.

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.

Globalism is a scheme for impoverishing First World labor and taking power and influence from the hands of the many and putting them in the hands of the few.

If money is free speech, the big interests are sitting in front with megaphones and the average citizens are sitting in the back.

I think Republicans need to take income inequality more seriously. Not because I favor equality of outcomes. I do not. I think the Right is correct to stress merit and earned rewards, not handouts and forced equality. But I think what Republicans are blind to is that power corrupts.

Under the process of ongoing globalization, advantages are, in the main, created for a minority of countries and development centres as well as powerful transnational companies.

Globalization creates economic policies where the transnationals lord over us, and the result is misery and unemployment.

We have to recognize that the freedom of the individual has to be protected not only from the power of the state, but even more so from economic and societal power.