Chrystia Freeland Quotes

There is no better example of social and economic policy discussion as an idle pastime for the rich than the World Economic Forum at Davos. These guys make the millionaire schmoozers at the Aspen Ideas Festival look like short-order cooks.

Middle-class democracy has proved the best camouflage of the political dominance of big capital.

Inequality [is] a social control mechanism supported by financial interests’ belief in the desirability of oligarchy.

Davos is where billionaires tell millionairs what middle class people think.

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

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

Capitalism is an organized system to guarantee that greed becomes the primary force of our economic system and allows the few at the top to get very wealthy and has the rest of us riding around thinking we can be that way, too - if we just work hard enough, sell enough Tupperware and Amway products, we can get a pink Cadillac.

Patrimonial capitalism's legacy is that many people see reform as a euphemism for corruption and self-dealing.

'Plutocracy.' It has a perfect nuance: chilly, inaccessible, icy-rich.

I remember an article, I can't recall who by, it was after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which said that now the Wall was down, there could be no more class war. Only someone with money could ever say such a thing.

I'm interested in illuminating the enormous disparity between vast poverty and the tiny upper class... This vast inequity is unfair by definition, and I am interested in illuminating that and, where possible, changing that.

The Tea Party people say they're angry about socialism, but maybe they're really angry about capitalism. If there's a sense of being looked down upon, it's that sense of failure that's built into a system that assures everyone they can make it to the top, but then reserves the top for only a tiny fraction of the strivers.

It is a fact that around the world the elites of every country are making money.

An imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

The rich don’t want the poor to get ahead of them.

Let Socialists make the laws today and they would break them tomorrow. No sooner do the poor become rich than they harden their hearts to the miseries of the poor. In so far as it proposes to correct the evils of unequal fortune, Socialism aims to repeal the laws of nature.

Economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege

Capitalism is very unfair but it is the only system that works.

What we call Monopoly is Business at the end of its journey. The concentration of wealth, the wiping out of the middle classes, are other names for it. To get it is, in the world of affairs, the chief end of man.

Wealth governs this country, and wealth uses military violence to control the rest of the world as best it can.

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.

Like Venice’s oligarchs, America’s super-rich are destroying the social mobility that creates wealth.

It is no accident that in America today the gap between the very rich and everyone else is wider than at any time since the Gilded Age. Now, as then, the titans are seeking an even greater political voice to match their economic power. Now, as then, the inevitable danger is that they will confuse their own self-interest with the common good.

When great wealth collects the way it has in the last two decades, it develops an arrogance…. You see it in the development of a survival of the fittest philosophy, one that says markets are more important than democracy.

Huge inequality gaps in a democratic society will tend to erode the respect for and security of doctrines of private property. The large majority must either own property or have reasonable prospects of attaining property if they are to support and maintain private property laws and traditions.