Economic Dependency Quotes

Labour parades compassion for the poor, but it practised casual cruelty by consigning millions to benefits. Yet there's nothing compassionate about being trapped on benefits, being robbed of the dignity of work, and shut out from the choices that brings.

What the welfare system and other kinds of governmental programs are doing is paying people to fail. In so far as they fail, they receive the money; in so far as they succeed, even to a moderate extent, the money is taken away.

The dominant orthodoxy in development economics was that Third World countries were trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty that could be broken only by massive foreign aid from the more prosperous industrial nations of the world. This was in keeping with a more general vision on the Left that people were essentially divided into three categories - the heartless, the helpless, and wonderful people like themselves, who would rescue the helpless by playing Lady Bountiful with the taxpayers' money.

Not since the days of slavery have there been so many people who feel entitled to what other people have produced as there are in the modern welfare state, whether in Western Europe or on this side of the Atlantic.

The more the state gives to its citizens, the less they have to earn. That is the basic concept of the welfare state - you receive almost everything you need without having to earn any of it. About half of Americans now pay no federal income tax - but they receive all government benefits just as if they had paid for, i.e., earned them.

Foreign aid breeds kleptocracies, or governments of thieves.

Skullcaps, fezes, turbans – it all costs money which goes to foreigners. We will become civilized…We will march forward…Civilization is a fearful fire which consumes those who ignore it.

The economist John Maynard Keynes said that in the long run, we are all dead. If he were around today he might say that, in the long run, we are all on Social Security and Medicare.

In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital.

We borrow 40 cents out of every dollar that we spend. We borrow most of it from countries like China. They have become major creditors of the United States and have more power over our economy than we want them to. So dealing with this is not only the right thing economically, it's certainly right from a moral viewpoint.

Wherever I've been, and I've been to over 20, maybe 25, countries in Africa, I've noticed how their backbone is broken. They don't have any confidence in themselves. They always think a white man will solve their problems from outside for them.

The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor – hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition.

The labourer has neither raw materials nor tools. These are provided for him by the capitalist. For making this provision the capitalist of course expects a reward

You know what the problem is with world hunger? We've been sending them food.

The more we spend on social spending the more we create an appetite for more social spending.

A considerable proportion of the developed world's prosperity rests on paying the lowest possible prices for the poor countries' primary products and on exporting high-cost capital and finished goods to those countries. Continuation of this kind of prosperity requires continuation of the relative gap between developed and underdeveloped countries - it means keeping poor people poor. Increasingly, the impoverished masses are understanding that the prosperity of the developed countries and of the privileged minorities in their own countries is founded on their poverty.

Whenever a Third World country accepts a structural adjustment loan and hence the imposition of a structural adjustment program, it has in effect delegated the task of running its economy to a foreign, non-elected body sitting in Washington DC.

Commerce diminishes the spirit, both of patriotism and military defence.

Nothing was made in Trinidad.

All almsgiving inevitably tends to pauperize the recipient.

Our economy is increasingly dependent on the success and integrity of the financial markets.

If this is the degree of inflation planned for in advance, the real outcome is indeed likely to be such that most of those who will retire at the end of the century will be dependent on the charity of the younger generation. And ultimately not morals but the fact that the young supply the police and the army will decide the issue: concentration camps for the aged unable to maintain themselves are likely to be the fate of an old generation whose income is entirely dependent on coercing the young.

Giving a poor person money keeps them poor.

Right now, a majority of the debt is owed to foreign interests, Japan being the largest purchaser of government debt today, soon to be surpassed by China as the number one purchaser of our debt in this Nation.

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.