Herbert Irving Schiller Quotes

Inequality is a good thing. You can’t have a capitalistic system without it. But we have excessive inequality now. Virtually all the benefits are going to a small group of people.

Equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists… we are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already”

The whole policy of the Cotton dynasty tends necessarily to making broader the chasm between these orders is most apparent. It makes the rich richer, and the poor poorer; for, as, according to the creed of the dynasty, capital should own labor, and the labor thus owned can alone successfully produce cotton.

You can make too much of inequality because there is always so much of it.

The greatest issue before the people—the question of special privilege and unequal distribution of wealth.

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.

I think that there always have been and always will be at least two Americas - the poor America, the second America, tends to be in the shadows. Sometimes it's an America of people in a ghetto of color, sometimes it's an economic ghetto, but definitely there is a parallel America which people in the dominant America prefer to ignore if they can.

In every commercial state, notwithstanding any pretension to equal rights, the exaltation of a few must depress the many.

The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people.

Why did the world ever become so unequal?

Choose equality …. Inequality has the natural and necessary effect … of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

There is a profound unfairness embedded in the economic system.

All the measures of government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

This society cannot go forward, the way we have been going forward, where the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing.

Unevenness of economic and political development is the inflexible law of capitalism.

The few who understand the system [of banking with capitalism] will either be so interested in its profits or be so dependent upon its favors that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests

Inequality is bad for everyone, not just the middle class and the poor.

Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it—because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords.

This country is very good at creating wealth, but not very good at distributing it.

The Western capitalist system is sunk to its neck in human problems. Despite the copious wealth that it has at its disposal, it is completely incapable of establishing social justice.

… there is inherent in the dynamics of capitalism a natural and destabilizing tendency toward inequality of income, wealth and opportunity.

Over time, economic benefits are accrued to the stronger, shrewder people in society, and if unrestrained by government, conditions would lead to economic autocracy and political despotism.

We live in a country of grotesque inequalities.

'Munmun' happened because the human world's dizzying inequality - of wealth and of power - had begun to send me over the edge, and I had to write something to try to help myself understand it a little better.

Things do go wrong. Not everyone benefits from the capitalist dream.