Paul Craig Roberts Quotes

Capitalism is in crisis.

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

The new social question is: democracy or the rule of the financial markets. We are currently witnessing the end of an era. The neoliberal ideology has failed worldwide. The U.S. movement Occupy Wall Street is a good example of this.

They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?

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.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Marxists are coming around to seeing my views on the economy with greater perspective. I was the one who propounded that there should be a 'level-playing field' among nations on the economic front, that they cannot have low-interest rates in their countries and argue against cheap labour in India.

We are often told that capitalism is in crisis, but look around the world and you'll see that it has never been so buoyant.

When the only people in mainstream discourse who care about the working class are Wall Street investors, it really is time to ask where our politics went wrong.

The global policy shift toward neo-liberalism that took place during the 1980s and 1990s was supposed, according to its proponents, to bring a convergence of living standards of richer and poorer nations. This never actually happened.

My idea, as the whole world knows, is that the capitalist system now doesn't work either for the United States or the world, driving it from crisis to crisis, which are each time more serious.

Capitalism has only hurt Latin America.

Public protests against globalization - protests that occur by and large in the prosperous West - denounce free trade and the mobility of capital as instruments of exploitation and oppression.

In the field of economy, for instance, we … members of the developing world follow the currents of globalization, with conditions set by the rich countries, and at a speed dictated without our slightest input.

The developing countries are scared out of their wits now, because they don’t understand what they’re being forced to sign. The agreements are going way outside the trade issues and involve a helluva lot of things like your access to oil, your access to intellectual property and capital controls…. When I looked through the investment agreements, it was worse than reading my insurance policy for the fine print. I couldn’t make anything out of it, and I’m a reasonably informed person, a pretty smart economist as they go.

… a policy of slashing the living standards at home and fighting for market share abroad for the single purpose of maintaining the profits of finance capital … Roosevelt is carrying out more thoroughly and brutally than even Hoover the capitalist attack on the living standards of the masses …

Many will see [globalization] as little more than a mask used by certain economic elites for taking away the voice of the individual citizen.

The unfettered free market has been the most radically disruptive force in American life in the last generation.

Many on the right confuse the "is" of globalization with the "ought" of simply accepting all its effects. They preach a political quietism that is really just a cloak for greed.

It would be well for those interested to reflect whether there now exists, or ever has existed, a wealthy and civilized community in which one portion did not live on the labor of another.... Remember that labor is the only source of wealth, and how small a portion of it, in all old and civilized countries, even the best governed, is left to those by whose labor wealth is created.

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea.

The people are rejecting so-called free trade and globalization that the elites presented as a positive thing.

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

The high-tech, globalized capitalism of the 21st century is very different from the postwar version of capitalism that performed so magnificently for the middle classes of the Western world.

The triumph of economic liberalization has coincided with a sharp increase in income inequality.

It is true that globalization has fueled greater income inequality. But much of this increase should be welcomed, not condemned. There is nothing inherently bad about inequality. Whether it is bad depends on how it comes about and what it does.