John > John's Quotes

“Just as some people are quick to predict the worst, there are others who are reluctant to accept that they might actually be in some danger. This is often caused by the false belief that if we identify and name risk, that somehow invites or causes it to happen. This thinking says: if we don’t see it and don’t accept it, it is prevented from happening. Only human beings can look directly at something, have all the information they need to make an accurate prediction, perhaps even momentarily make the accurate prediction, and then says that it isn’t so.”
― Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

“Wikipedia: Richard D. Wolff

To escape Nazism, Wolff's parents emigrated from Europe to the United States during World War II. …
Wolff states that his European background influenced his world view:

"[E]verything you expect about how the world works probably will be changed in your life, that unexpected things happen, often tragic things happen, and being flexible, being aware of a whole range of different things that happen in the world, is not just a good idea as a thinking person, but it's crucial to your survival. So, for me, I grew up convinced that understanding the political and economic environment I lived in was an urgent matter that had to be done, and made me a little different from many of my fellow kids in school who didn't have that sense of the urgency of understanding how the world worked to be able to navigate an unstable and often dangerous world. That was a very important lesson for me.”
― Richard D. Wolff

“Just as we seldom realize that we are growing old until we are already old, so do the contemporary actors in a major social change seldom realize that society is changing until the change has already come.”
― James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World

“Page 180:
A fascinating contemporary parallel, and another example of destruction through centralization if a federal union harbors a single disproportionately large power, has been furnished by the short-lived United States of Indonesia. When it was created in December 1949, it was composed of sixteen member states of which one was so large that its subordination without its own consent was impossible …

Page 183:
… if our present unifiers really want union, they must have disunion first. If Europe is to be united under the auspices of the European Council, its participating great powers must first be dissolved to a degree that, as in Switzerland … none of its component units is left with a significant superiority in size and strength over the others.

Page 187:
This is why such attempts at international union as the European Council or the United Nations are doomed to failure if they continue to insist on their present composition. Compromising with their framework a number of unabsorbably great powers, they suffer from the deadly disease of political cancer. To save them it would be necessary to follow Professor Simons who said of the overgrown nation-states that:

‘These monsters of nationalism and mercantilism must be dismantled, both to preserve world order and to protect internal peace. Their powers to wage war and restrict world trade must be sacrificed to some supranational state or league of nations. Their other powers and functions must be diminished in favor of states, provinces, and, in Europe, small nations.’

This is, indeed, the only way by which the problem of international government can be solved. The great powers, those monsters of nationalism, must be broken up and replaced by small states; for, as perhaps even our diplomats will eventually be able to understand, only small states are wise, modest and, above all, weak enough, to accept an authority higher than their own.

Page 190
But war is fortunately not the only means by which great powers can be divided. Engulfed in a swamp of infantile emotionalism, and attaching phenomenal value to the fact that they are big and mighty, they cannot be persuaded to execute their own dissolution. But, being infantile and emotional, they can be tricked into it.”
― Leopold Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations

“Quoting page 115: The Hispanic civil rights organizations were heavily financed by the Ford Foundation, whose president from the late 1960s through the 1970s was McGeorge Bundy, Harvard alumni veteran of the Kennedy White House and tower of the nation’s eastern liberal establishment. In 1968 Ford had created MALDEF, as a Latino version of the NAACP, with a $2.2 million founding grant. La Raza, given a similar birthing grant of $630,000 by Ford in 1968, received $1,953,700 two years later. Between 1970 and 1999, Ford gave MALDEF $27.9 million and La Raza $21.5 million.

In 1981 Ford started funding LULAC, the oldest Hispanic association. Noted since its origins in Texas in 1929 for espousing patriotism, political moderation, self-help ethnic, support for English language mastery, and bourgeois civic boosterism, LULAC in the 1970s adopted the strident tone of Chicano nationalism common to La Raza and MALDEF. In 1983 the Ford Foundation, led by Ford’s first African-American president, Franklin A. Thomas, began funding the National Immigration Forum, an umbrella association modeled on the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, to coordinate lobbying against [immigration] restrictionist organizations such as FAIR. LULAC, although joining the racialized agenda of MALDEF and La Raza in the 1970s, retained its character as a membership-based organization rooted in the Hispanic (mainly Mexican-American) community. But the constituency represented by MALDEF and La Raza was essentially the Ford Foundation and the tightly networking community of Latino political careerists.”
― Hugh Davis Graham, Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America

“Pathological altruism refers to sincere attempts to help others that instead harms others or oneself and where this harm could have been reasonably anticipated. It is often caused by cognitive and/or emotional biases that blind people to the potentially harmful consequences of their actions.

Altruistic intentions must be run through the sieve of rational analysis; all too often, the best long-term action to help others, at both personal and public scales, is not immediately or intuitively obvious, not what temporarily makes us feel good, and not what is being promoted by other individuals, with their own potentially self-serving interests. Indeed, truly altruistic actions may sometimes appear cruel or harmful, the equivalent of saying “no” to the student who demands a higher grade or to the addict who needs another hit. However, the social consequences of appearing cruel in a culture that places high value on kindness, empathy, and altruism can lead us to misplaced “helpful” behavior and result in self-deception regarding the consequences of our actions.

In some cases, some people gain some benefit from the altruism, but other people and/or the altruist are harmed in ways that could be reasonably predicted, but are not due to such biases. These altruistic biases may be deliberately exploited by some people in order to gain benefits at the expense of other people.

Feelings of self-righteousness and sanctimony have been described as being an intensely pleasurable addiction for some people, which contributes to blind pathological altruism and rejection of logical arguments.”
― Wikipedia: Pathological Altruism

“Max Hartshorn, Artem Kaznatcheev and Thomas Shultz (2013)
The Evolutionary Dominance of Ethnocentric Cooperation
Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 16 (3) 7

Abstract
Recent agent-based computer simulations suggest that ethnocentrism, often thought to rely on complex social cognition and learning, may have arisen through biological evolution. From a random start, ethnocentric strategies dominate other possible strategies (selfish, traitorous, and humanitarian) based on cooperation or non-cooperation with in-group and out-group agents. Here we show that ethnocentrism eventually overcomes its closest competitor, humanitarianism, by exploiting humanitarian cooperation across group boundaries as world population saturates. Selfish and traitorous strategies are self-limiting because such agents do not cooperate with agents sharing the same genes. Traitorous strategies fare even worse than selfish ones because traitors are exploited by ethnocentrics across group boundaries in the same manner as humanitarians are, via unreciprocated cooperation.”
― Max Hartshorne

“The impulse to form group identities and favor in-group members has a neurological basis. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), scientists have scanned people’s brains while conducting experiments similar to the one just described. Their findings, as one writer puts it, suggest that: “group identification is both innate and almost immediate.”
― Amy Chua, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations

“Most whites do not have a racial identity, but they would do well to understand what race means for others. They should also ponder the consequences of being the only group for whom such an identity is forbidden and who are permitted no aspirations as a group.”
― Jared Taylor

“Given that some ethnic groups—especially ones with high levels of ethnocentrism and mobilization—will undoubtedly continue to function as groups far into the foreseeable future, unilateral renunciation of ethnic loyalties by some groups means only their surrender and defeat—the Darwinian dead end of extinction. The future, then, like the past, will inevitably be a Darwinian competition in which ethnicity plays a very large role.

The alternative faced by Europeans throughout the Western world is to place themselves in a position of enormous vulnerability in which their destinies will be determined by other peoples, many of whom hold deep historically conditioned hatreds toward them. Europeans' promotion of their own displacement is the ultimate foolishness—an historical mistake of catastrophic proportions.”
― Kevin B. MacDonald

“The loss of political power by what the Census Bureau calls "non-Hispanic Whites" as they dwindle from a majority to a minority is only the most apparent such change, and it is hardly unreasonable to expect that what will follow from the transfer of power will be the outright dispossession and political and legal persecution of the white minority by a non-white and non-Western majority that has little experience of constitutional government, little respect for the rights of minorities and oppositional groups, and little love for whites or the West. Indeed, we already see the beginnings of that dispossession in affirmative action programs, hate crime laws, multiculturalist curricula, calculated insults to and vituperation of whites, and the proliferation of racially motivated atrocities against them.”
― Samuel T. Francis, Revolution from the Middle

“The confused relationship of class to ethnicity is now much clearer. On the one hand, it has often been stated that ethnic conflict is really class conflict. On the other, it has been said that ethnic conflict is an alternative or a barrier to class conflict. Both are true, but not in the broad way in which they have been asserted. Ethnic and class conflict coincide when ethnicity and class coincide – in ranked systems. … Ethnic conflict … impedes or obscures class conflict when ethnic groups are cross-class, as they are in unranked systems. There is, under those circumstances, a strong tendency to reject class conflict, for it would require either interethnic class-based alliances or intraethnic class antagonisms, either of which would detract from the ethnic solidarity that unranked ethnic conflict requires.”
― Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface

“Quoting page 99-101:

The opening of unregulated foreign trade causes a general shift of production and jobs to the low-wage nations. They experience a rapid rise in production of advanced goods and in the availability of skill-developing and high-paid jobs, rapidly build new factories, and experience a rapid upgrading in their jobs, economic capabilities, and income.

The other side of these benefits to the low-income nations is the corresponding damage to the high-income nations, that are losing the industries and jobs that these nations are gaining. The high-income nations experience an excess of imports over exports, a decline in production of advanced goods and in the availability of skill-developing and high-paid jobs, suffer a decline and obsolescence in their industrial plant, and a downgrading in their available jobs, economic capabilities, and income.

This pattern of trade is anomalous not only because it calls on the high-income nations to acquiesce in their own economic decline, but because it points toward a world-wide failure or collapse. The low-income nations are betting their futures on continued increases in sales of advanced goods in the markets of the high-income nations--but these markets are being undermined by the economic decline of the high-income nations. If the low-income nations have a very large population, and especially if any of the nations in the unregulated-trade group have rapid rates of population-growth, the end result of the process will be that there will be no high-income nations anywhere and no substantial market for advanced goods. In the end, all nations are dragged down. The rise in the low-income nations cannot be extrapolated into the future, for it destroys the conditions by which it is temporarily supported. ...

The final effects on the standard of living of the high-income nation of unregulated foreign trade are similar to the effects of its permitting unlimited immigration. The shifting of the jobs to the low-wage nation has the same effects as the shifting of excessive numbers of workers to the high-wage nation.”
― John M. Culbertson, The Trade Threat and the U.S. Trade Policy

“Page 61-2

... Rome expanded rapidly ... and became master over the entire Mediterranean Basin. It then had unlimited resources in terms of land, money, and slaves. It collected taxes or tribute throughout its empire and was able to transfer to the central capital massive quantities of foodstuffs and manufactured items. The peasants and the artisans of Italy saw their economic base disappear as this Mediterranean economy was "globalized" by the political domination of Rome. The society was polarized between, on the one hand, a mass of economically useless plebeians and, on the other, a predatory plutocracy. A minority gorged with wealth oversaw the remaining proletarianized population. The middle-classes collapsed, a process that brought about the end of the republic and the beginning of the political form known as "empire" in conformity with the observations made by Aristotle about the importance of intermediate social classes for the stability of political systems.

Since one could not eliminate the plebeians, intractable but geographically central as they were, they came to be nourished and distracted at the empire's expense with "bread and circuses."

Page 64-5:

The positive American trade balance, when only "advanced technology" is counted, dropped from 35 billion dollars in 1990 to 5 billion in 2001 and had disappeared entirely to become one more element in the overall trade deficit in January 2002.

This fall in economic strength is not compensated for by the activities of American-based multinationals. Since 1998 the profits that they bring back into the country amount to less than what foreign companies that have set up shop in the United States are taking back to their own countries.

Page 68:
In conformity with classical economic theory, the general opening up of commercial exchange has brought about an increase in inequality throughout the world. This general exchange tends to introduce into each country the same disparities in revenue that exist at the level of the whole planet. ... The compression of worker revenues caused by free trade revives the traditional dilemma of capitalism that has now spread across the globe: low salaries do not allow for the absorption of increases in production.
Page 17: In developed countries a new class is emerging that comprises roughly 20 percent of the population in terms of sheer numbers but controls about half of each nation's wealth. This new class has more and more trouble putting up with the constraint of universal suffrage.”
― Emmanuel Todd, After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order

“If the reader does not like some of the facts that emerge, I hope against hope that he will not blame me for their existence.”
― Hans Jürgen Eysenck, The IQ argument: race, intelligence, and education,

“The incentives toward reactive ethnic voting are strong. When voters of one group choose, in effect, not to choose but to give their vote predictably on an ethnic basis to an ethnically defined party, they put voters of the other group who do choose among parties at a collective disadvantage. All else being equal, such voters will seek to reduce their disadvantage by concentrating their votes in a comparable ethnic party. In such a situation, ethnic votes tend to drive out nonethnic votes.”
― Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface

“Page 112: In 1970 an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission administrator, Alfred Blumrosen—who despite his relative obscurity is one of the major architects and theorists of today’s racial preference system—expressed this repudiation of color-blind liberalism with surprising candor:

"If discrimination is narrowly defined, for example, be requiring an evil intent to injure minorities, then it will be difficult to find that it exists. If it does not exist, then the plight of racial and ethnic minorities must be attributable to some more generalized failures in society, in the fields of basic education, housing, family relations, and the like. The search for efforts to improve the condition of minorities must then focus in these general and difficult areas, and the answers can come only gradually as basic institutions, attitudes, customs, and practices are changed."

The solution, for Blumrosen and other left-liberal bureaucrats and judges, was to redefine discrimination to mean disparity, to permit the government, “by intelligent, effective, and aggressive legal action,” to assign positions in schools, factories, offices, and government on the basis of racial proportions in the population at large.”
― Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution

“Quoting page 63: Business interests not surprisingly supported the [1965 immigration reform] bill as well, but were not a driving force behind it. Because the baby boom was pouring new workers into the economy, and the assault on racial discrimination promised to feed millions of underemployed blacks into the workforce as well, employers did not seem to be looking for workers overseas. Even the growers were quiet. Sponsors of the Bracero farm worker program that had imported hundreds of thousands of mostly Mexican contract workers since 1942—the program averaged 430,000 guestworkers a year from Mexico during its peak 1955-60 years—the growers had been attacked by organized labor, religious, and civil rights organization for exploiting foreign workers and depressing labor standards. The same liberal coalition that backed the civil rights and immigration reforms of 1964-65 had persuaded Congress to terminate the Bracero program in 1964. …

The Wall Street Journal, commenting on the conservative nature of the immigration reform, noted on October 4, 1965, that the family preference priorities would ensure that “the new immigration system would not stray radically from the old one.” The historically restrictionist American Legion Magazine agreed, reassured by the promises of continuity. As Senator Edward Kennedy had pledged in the Senate hearings on immigration, first, “Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same,” and second, “the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.”
― Hugh Davis Graham, Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America

“Quoting page 56-57: Most important for the content of immigration reform, the driving force at the core of this movement, reaching back to the 1920s, were Jewish organizations long active in opposing racial and ethnic quotas. These included the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and the American Federation of Jews from Eastern Europe. Jewish members of Congress, particularly representatives from New York and Chicago, had maintained steady but largely ineffective pressure against the national origins quotas since the 1920s. But the war against Hitler and the postwar movement against colonialism sharply changed the ideological and moral environment, putting defenders of racial, caste, and ethnic hierarchies on the defensive. Jewish political leaders in New York, most prominently Governor Herbert Lehman, had pioneered in the 1940s in passing state antidiscrimination legislation. Importantly, these statutes and executive orders added “national origin” to race, color, and religion as impermissible grounds for discrimination.

Following the shock of the Holocaust, Jewish leaders had been especially active in Washington in furthering immigration reform. To the public, the most visible evidence of the immigration reform drive was played by Jewish legislative leaders, such as Representative Celler and Senator Jacob Javits of New York. Less visible, but equally important, were the efforts of key advisers on presidential and agency staffs. These included senior policy advisers such as Julius Edelson and Harry Rosenfield in the Truman administration, Maxwell Rabb in the Eisenhower White House, and presidential aide Myer Feldman, assistant secretary of state Abba Schwartz, and deputy attorney general Norbert Schlei in the Kennedy-Johnson administration.”
― Hugh Davis Graham, Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America

“Page 193:
Any attempt to increase the population size of one ethnic group relative to others is confrontational. As such, it is clearly not meant to dissuade ethnic leaders and nationalist populations against ethnic conflict. In fact, the goal of increasing ethnic populations is based on the underlying view that, with successful demographic engineering, an ethnic group will gain dominance over others. Similarly, the methods for population augmentation involve processes that are antagonistic to selected ethnic groups. Indeed, relocating population, forcing assimilation, and encouraging population growth of a target population are all antagonistic acts. Such confrontational policies are resented by those they are meant to affect, and are bound to provoke an intensification of nationalist sentiment and amplify demands for ethnic rights (be they cultural or secessionist). … Since ethnic regulation implies the elimination or suppression of ‛other’ ethnicities, instead of easing inter-ethnic animosities and improving inter-ethnic relations, the demographic struggle for power portends the perpetuation of inter-ethnic conflict.”
― Milica Zarkovic Bookman, The Demographic Struggle for Power

“The Times celebration of Brown as confirming constitutional color blindness was widely shared in America. In the debates over the Kennedy-Johnson civil rights bill in 1963 and 1964, the bipartisan congressional leadership appealed to the classical liberal model of color-blind justice, leaning over backwards to deny charges by southern opponents that the law could lead to quotas or other forms of preference for minorities. Indeed, the legislative history of the Civil Rights Act shows what John David Skrentny, author of The Ironies of Affirmative Action, called “an almost obsessive concern” for maintaining fidelity to a color-blind concept of equal individual rights. Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, the majority (Democratic) whip behind the bill, explained simply: “Race, religion and national origin are not to be used as the basis for hiring and firing.”

Title VII required employers to treat citizens differing in race, sex, national origin, or religion equally, as abstract citizens differing only in merit. Section 703(j) of the Civil Rights Act states: “Nothing contained in this title shall be interpreted to require any employer… to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any group because of the race, color, religion, sex, or national origin of such individual or group on account of an imbalance which my exist with respect to the total number or percentage of persons of any race, color, religion, sex, or national origin employed by an employer.” The syntax was classic legalese, but the meaning was unambiguous. The Senate’s floor managers for Title VII, Joseph S. Clark (D-Pa.) and Clifford P. Case (R-N.J.), told their colleagues, “The concept of discrimination… is clear and simple and has no hidden meanings. …To discriminate means to make a distinction, to make a difference in treatment or favor, which is based on any five of the forbidden criteria: race, color, religion, sex, or nation origin.” They continued:

There is no requirement in Title VII that an employer maintain a balance in his work force. On the contrary, any deliberate attempt to maintain a racial balance, whatever such a balance may be, would involve a violation of Title VII because maintaining such a balance would require an employer to hire or refuse to hire on the basis of race. It must be emphasized that discrimination is prohibited to any individual.

Humphrey, trying to lay to rest what he called the “bugaboo” of racial quotas raised by filibustering southerners in his own party and by some conservative Republicans as well, reaffirmed the bill’s color-blind legislative intent: “That bugaboo has been brought up a dozen times; but it is nonexistent. In fact the very opposite is true. Title VII prohibits discrimination. In effect, it sways that race, religion, and national origin are not to be used as the basis for hiring and firing.” Humphrey even famously pledged on the Senate floor that if any wording could be found in Title VII “which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, … I will start eating the pages [of the bill] one after another.”
― Hugh Davis Graham

“Assimilation: The Ideal and the Reality
By B. A. Nelson, Ph.D

Milton M. Gordon, in his Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins, has defined three discrete stages in the development of this concept. The ideal of “Anglo-conformity,” which “demanded the complete renunciation of the immigrant’s ancestral culture in favor of the behavior and values of the Anglo-Saxon core group” prevailed almost until the end of the nineteenth century. It was superseded in the following two decades by the “melting pot” ideal, which heralded “a biological merger of the Anglo-Saxon peoples with other immigrant groups and a blending of their respective cultures into a new indigenous American type.” During the 1920s, the ideal of ”cultural pluralism” came into vogue, postulating “the preservation of the communal life and significant portions of the culture of the later immigrant groups within the context of American citizenship and political and economic integration into American society.”

… total and widespread acceptance of “Anglo-conformity” would be an impossible anachronism in the 1980s, when the majority of the nation’s immigrants come from Third World nations. Despite the glaring contradiction between the ideal of “Anglo-conformity” and the reality of contemporary immigration, one aspect of “Anglo-conformity” does, however, linger on as a phantom “residue,” much like the whiff of scent which remains in a long-emptied bottle. Although both leaders and the led know that “Anglo-conformity” has become an impossible ideal, both retain this one notion that has become a perennial source of solace whenever anyone dares to suggest that future immigration might challenge and deny the national premise of e pluribus unum.

… This notion assures those who believe in it that, even if the “Anglo-Saxon core group” dwindles in numbers and power to the point of becoming marginal, the Anglo-Saxon political heritage will yet survive. … This last “residue” of belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority would be simply an innocuous illusion were there not indications that official public policy is moving in a direction directly contrary to the Anglo-Saxon political tradition. ,,, The new American dilemma, as fateful as the one once addressed by Gunnar Myrdal, is the nation’s drift away from its tradition of “liberal pluralism,” in which “government gives no formal recognition to categories of people based on race or ethnicity,” and towards a new, “corporate pluralism,” which “envisages a nation where its racial and ethnic entities are formally recognized as such -- are given formal standing as groups in the national polity -- and where patterns of political power and economic reward are based on a distributive formula which postulates group rights and which defines group membership as an important factor in the outcome for individuals.”

… Corporate pluralism is, in fact, the opposite of the popular notion of assimilation as the disappearance of alien characteristics in an all-transforming native culture. Since corporate pluralism replaces “individual meritocracy” with “group rewards,” it strongly discourages assimilation…”
― Brent A. Nelson

“Page 117:
Assimilation takes place in the spheres of religion and language most easily and is most successful among people who are culturally similar to the dominant group. When race is the distinguishing feature, assimilation efforts become irrelevant.”
― Milica Zarkovic Bookman, The Demographic Struggle for Power

“It would be a lot easier if each of us were related to someone of another color and if, eventually, we were all one color. In America, this can happen.”
― Morton Kondracke

“Assimilation is the process of interpenetration and fusion of the habits, customs, traditions and historical backgrounds of different ethnic groups in such a way that their major cultural distinctions become synthesized into one culture, and the groups become more or less one people mutually sharing the privileges and responsibilities of a common society. This process has been going on throughout the entire span of human history. Not once, to my knowledge, has it happened without intermarriage ultimately taking place. In fact, intermarriage is perhaps the crucial test in determining when a people have completely won their way into the mainstream of any given society.”
― Calvin C. Hernton, Sex and Racism in America

“Modern liberalism told us that racial differences don't matter, and on the basis of that belief, liberals then set about turning America into a multiracial, integrated, race-blind society. But now that very effort has created so much race consciousness, race conflict and race inequality, that the same liberals have concluded that the only way to overcome those problems is to merge all the races into one. The same people who have always denounced as an extremist lunatic anyone who warned about `the racial dilution of white America,' are now proposing, not just the dilution of white America, but its complete elimination. Race-blind ideology has led directly to the most race-conscious --- and indeed genocidal --- proposal in the history of the world.”
― Lawrence Auster, The Path to National Suicide: An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism

“This book is about a phenomenon—pervasive outside the West yet rarely acknowledged, indeed often viewed as taboo—that turns free market democracy into an engine of ethnic conflagration. The phenomenon I refer to is that of market-dominant minorities: ethnic minorities who, for widely varying reasons, tend under market conditions to dominate economically, often to a startling extent, the “indigenous” majorities around them. … Lebanese are a market-dominant minority in West Africa. Ibo are a market-dominant minority in Nigeria. Croats were a market-dominant minority in the former Yugoslavia. And Jews are almost certainly a market-dominant minority in post-Communist Russia”
― Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

“Page 259:
The bottom line is this. Democracy can be inimical to the interests of market-dominant minorities. There were good reasons why the Indians in Kenya and whites in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and America’s Southern states resisted democratization for generations. Market-dominant minorities do not really want democracy, at least not in the sense of having their fate determined by genuine majority rule. Some readers will surely protest. Many market-dominant minorities—the Chinese in Malaysia, for example, or Jews in Russia, and Americans everywhere—often seem to be among the most vocal advocates of democracy. But “democracy” is a notoriously contested term, meaning different things to different people. When entrepreneurial but politically vulnerable minorities like the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Indians in East Africa, or Jews in Russia call for democracy, they principally have in mind constitutionally guaranteed human rights and property protections for minorities. In other words, in calling for democracy, these “outsider” groups are precisely seeking protection against “tyranny of the majority.”
― Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

“Page 107 -- Trading minorities, it is argued, come into conflict with business rivals of other ethnic groups. Conflict occurs, not merely because of ordinary business rivalries, but because immigrant minorities are able to undercut their rivals by the use of their own credit institutions, their guild techniques of restraining competition among themselves, and their use of cheap, usually family, labor. Their interests also collide with the interests of those with whom they transact business: consumers, tenants, clients. Finally, because trading minorities have the ability to obtain their own cheap labor, they depress the prospects for labor in the host society. The tractable character of labor in middleman minority firms insures that rising wages in competing businesses would not be accompanied by similar increases for workers of minority firms. A competing firm in the host society that granted a wage increase would find itself priced out of the market. Eventually, workers in host society firms come to identify immigrant businesses and the low wages they pay as the source of the low wages paid in the economy generally”
― Donald L. Horowitz

“Page 33: The magnitude of the Chinese minority’s economic power was astounding. Constituting just 1 percent of Vietnam’s population, the Chinese controlled an estimated 90 percent of non-European private capital in the mid-1950s and dominated Vietnam’s retail trade, its financial, manufacturing, and transportation sectors, and all aspects of the country’s rice economy.
Page 43: By 1998, Sino-Indonesians occupied a position of economic dominance wildly disproportionate to their numbers. Just 3 percent of the population, the Chinese controlled approximately 70 percent of the private economy.”
― Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability