Sublime

Andrew Redleaf and Richard Vigilante write in Panic: The Betrayal of Capitalism by Wall Street and Washington, “The ideology of modern finance replaced the capitalist’s appreciation for free markets as a context for human creativity with the worship of efficient markets as substitutes for that creativity. The result was a divorce of entrepreneurial

The term used by Pareto to describe the other type, the rentier, is translated into English as the stockholder-though he sounds more like the bag holder to me. Such people, he says, are the routine, steady-going, unimaginative, conserving people, whom the speculator manipulates.

The winners in Smart America have withdrawn from the national life of their fellow Americans. Christopher Lasch, writing in the early 1990s when this withdrawal was young, called it “the revolt of the elites.” Between meritocracy and democracy, it’s the first that dominates their waking hours, commands their unthinking devotion, and drives them, li

But whoever makes the bargain, and whatever is its precise character, the substance of it will be servile. It will be servile in the only rational and reliable sense; that is, an arrangement by which a mass of men are ensured shelter and livelihood, in return for being subjected to a law which obliges them to continue to labour.

When the accumulation drive hits short-term credit, real estate, and passive equity, that is when the party will really start.

In recent years a new anti-monopoly movement has emerged, partly inspired by the Progressives, with new ideas for the old desire to make all citizens capable of participating in our political and economic life. Its most famous advocate is Senator Elizabeth Warren, who often echoes Brandeis, and who told the story of Frances Perkins one night in a c

Il peut paraître étonnant qu’un homme qui avait directement participé au processus d’expropriation des biens des Juifs allemands se mue en ardent défenseur de la propriété ; mais ce n’est ni par amnésie ni par repentance qu’Abs endosse ce rôle. Dans son discours de San Francisco, il ne manque pas de soulever la question épineuse de Cortney et Röpke

I will tell you the secret of getting rich on Wall Street. [Pause.] Close the doors. You try to be greedy when others are fearful and you try to be very fearful when others are greedy.§