Why We Can't Afford the Rich Quotes

“Debt has become the means of subjecting everyone – from sovereign nations to homeowners and victims of payday loan sharks – to a mixture of ersatz morality and threats. Pay your debts or else you’re a bad person or bad country, and so bad things will happen to you.35”
― Andrew Sayer, Why We Can't Afford the Rich

“The super-rich have so much that there is no way they can spend all of it on things they can use, so they recycle the rest into further rounds of speculation, buying up property, companies and financial assets that generate little or no productive investment, and merely siphon off more wealth that others have produced.”
― Andrew Sayer, Why We Can't Afford the Rich

“Mainstream economics takes the particular features of capitalism – a very recent form of economic organisation in human history – as if they were universal, timeless and rational. It treats market exchange as if it’s the essential feature of economic behaviour31 and relegates production or work – a necessity of all provisioning – to an afterthought. It also focuses primarily on the relationship between people and goods (what determines how many oranges we buy?) and pays little attention to the relationships between people that this presupposes.”
― Andrew Sayer, Why We Can't Afford the Rich

“Aren’t the rich wealth creators, job creators, entrepreneurs, investors – indeed, just the kind of people we need? Don’t entrepreneurs like Bill Gates deserve their wealth for having introduced products that benefit millions? Aren’t the rich entitled to spend what they have earned how they like? What right has anyone to say their consumption is excessive? Couldn’t the rich cut their carbon footprints by switching to low-carbon consumption? Wouldn’t the world miss their philanthropy and the ‘trickle-down effects’ of their spending? In fact, isn’t this book just an example of ‘the politics of envy’ – directed at those whom former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair used to call ‘the successful’? Shouldn’t we thank, rather than begrudge, these ‘high net worth individuals’? It’s the objections regarding the alleged role of the rich in wealth extraction, as opposed to wealth creation, that present the biggest challenge and occupy the bulk of this book, though I’ll attempt to answer other objections too. In”
― Andrew Sayer, Why We Can't Afford the Rich

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning. (Warren Buffett, estimated ‘worth’ $44 billion, Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, quoted in the New York Times, 26 November 2006)1”
― Andrew Sayer, Why We Can't Afford the Rich

“How strange – and interesting – that modern governments would rather tax earned income than unearned income!”
― Andrew Sayer, Why We Can't Afford the Rich

“The solution to the economic crisis is widely thought to be growth. But that will only accelerate global warming. The rich countries need to switch to steady-state or ‘degrowth’ economies to save the planet, but capitalism needs growth to survive; it’s in its DNA. Soviet state socialism proved no better environmentally. We need a different model.”
― Andrew Sayer, Why We Can't Afford the Rich

“The market/non-market boundary does not define the edge of the economy: unpaid work in preparing a meal for someone is as much an economic act as preparing pizzas for sale – or selling computers or insurance.”
― Andrew Sayer, Why We Can't Afford the Rich