Economic Dictatorship Quotes

In your dread of dictators you established a state of society in which every ward boss is a dictator, every private employer a dictator, every financier a dictator, all with the livelihood of the workers at his mercy, and no public responsibility.

A government that seizes control of the economy for the good of the people, ends up seizing control of the people for the good of the economy.

In the first place, it is obvious that not only is wealth concentrated in our times but an immense power and despotic economic dictatorship is consolidated in the hands of a few, who often are not owners but only the trustees and managing directors of invested funds which they administer according to their own arbitrary will and pleasure. This dictatorship is being most forcibly exercised by those who, since they hold the money and completely control it, control credit also and rule the lending of money.

Along this road of spending, the government either takes over, which is Socialism, or dictates institutional and economic life, which is Fascism.

The Bretton Woods agreement will enthrone a world dictatorship of private finance more complete and terrible than an Hitlerite dream. It offers no solution of world problems, but quite blatantly sets up controls which will reduce the smaller nations to vassal states and make every government the mouthpiece and tool of International Finance. It will undermine and destroy the democratic institutions.

The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly human goal.

The ultimate consequences of the individualist spirit in economic life are those which you yourselves, Venerable Brethren and Beloved Children, see and deplore: Free competition has destroyed itself; economic dictatorship has supplanted the free market; unbridled ambition for power has likewise succeeded greed for gain; all economic life has become tragically hard, inexorable, and cruel.

With the bank crash of 1931, the [Third German] Reich attained a position from which it dominates more than three-fourths of all German banking, and owns about forty percent of their shares.... When this life-saving expedition was over, the Reich was the dictator of the whole German banking world.