Rick Perlstein Quotes

All the actions of your government have been in favour of the markets, and against the people.

The kind of capitalism I hate most is crony capitalism, the friends who decide. These are things which should be killed in Russia.

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.

If you or I fail at business, we fail. If we cheat and fail, we go to jail. But if you're rich and politically connected, your incompetence may be protected by a government bailout.

When you have corporate influence on our government outweighing the influence of citizens, that's terrifying. This is something we have to make a big, big noise about.

Americans cannot maintain their essential faith in government if there are two Americas, in which the private sector's work subsidizes the disproportionate benefits of this new public sector elite.

Special interests are a roadblock wielding undue influence over policy makers. They seek to maintain short-term profits with little regard to either the long-term impact on the planet that will be inherited by our children and grand-children or the long-term economic well-being of our country.

We aren't living the gospel of democracy and free enterprise today. We are merely preaching it. We have made only half of the combination work, and we've done that superlatively well. Free enterprise booms. But democracy staggers and reels under oppressive debts and inordinate operating costs-both the consequences of political failure.

It was a new kind of class war — the people as citizens versus the politicians and their clients in the public sector.

We’d be crazy to let corporations get anywhere near our government. The only reason they want to influence government is to plunder—to steal from children.

Not only in Africa but in much of the world, most leaders' pockets are lined by industrial business. And industrial business is never going to stop aiming at profit.

In practice, getting rid of crony capitalism is incredibly difficult.

Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction.

State government has too often been used to look out for the insiders and not the citizens. This has insulated poverty from progress, and need from remedy.

Capitalism is the worst friend of humanity.

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.

I think that capitalism in general is responsible, not for the worldwide recession, but for a lot of suffering, both in the United States and around the world.

Capitalism proceeds through creative destruction. What is created is capitalism in a 'new and improved' form - and what is destroyed is self-sustaining capacity, livelihood and dignity of its innumerable and multiplied 'host organisms' into which all of us are drawn/seduced one way or another.

When a company is not being guided by the products they make and what the customers need, but by how they can manipulate the system - get regulations on their competitors, or mandates on using their products, or eliminating foreign competition - it just lowers the overall standard of living and hurts the disadvantaged the most.

Unlike the Tea Party, who see themselves as the customers of government, people in the Occupy Wall Street movement understand that we are the government. Stated most simply, we are trying to run a 21st-century society on a 13th-century economic operating system. It just doesn't work.

There's a delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying in to Washington, D.C., and people coming off of them with tin cups in their hands saying that they're going to be trimming down and streamlining their businesses. There's a message there.

Capitalism, after all, is no fun when real failure becomes a possibility.

To me, regardless of who's in office, the government is strangled by business. And the government's priorities are dictated by business. I mean, why does America, even after healthcare reform, still not have free universal healthcare? I'm sure it has something to do with the insurance lobby.

I have a lot of sympathy with the ideas and frustration of the Occupy movement. I absolutely agree with the sense that Wall Street has brought an economic calamity to the middle class and that no one has been held accountable.

The ability of the 1 percent to buy politicians and regulators is nothing new in American politics - just as inequality has been a permanent part of our economic system. This is true of virtually all political and economic systems.