Market Quotes - page 82
If one strand in the heritage of the Sixties was high-cultural pretension, the other, its intimate inversion, was a hardening crust of knowing cynicism. The relative innocence of rock and roll was increasingly displaced by media-wise pop bands whose stock in trade was a derisive appropriation and degradation of the style forged by their immediate precursors. Much as popular romances and tabloid journalism had once fastened on to mass literacy for commercial advantage, so ‘punk' rock appeared in the Seventies in order to exploit the market for popular music. Presented as ‘counter-cultural' it was in fact parasitic upon mainstream culture, invoking violent images and radical language for frequently mercenary ends.
Tony Judt
Geis is a pain, Sharrow; the guy has a kind of charming facade but basically he's a social inadequate whose real place in life is out mugging pensioners and cheating and beating on his girlfriends, and if he had three more names and been raised in a rookery in the The Meg rather than the nursery at house Tzant, that's exactly what he would be doing. Instead he jumps out of the commercial equivalent of dark allies, strips companies and fucks their employees. He's got no idea how real people work so he plays the market instead; he's a rich kid who thinks the banks and courts and Corps are his construction set and he doesn't want anybody else to play. He wants you the way he wants a sexy company, as a bauble, a scalp, something to display. Never get beholden to people like that, they'll piss on you and then charge irrigation fees.
Iain Banks
Pauperism, political economy, and the discovery of society were closely interwoven. Pauperism fixed attention on the incomprehensible fact that poverty seemed to go with plenty. Yet this was only the first of the baffling paradoxes with which industrial society was to confront modern man. He had entered his new abode through the door of economics, and this adventitious circumstance invested the age with its materialist aura. To Ricardo and Malthus nothing seemed more real than material goods. The laws of the market meant for them the limit of human possibilities. Godwin believed in unlimited possibilities and hence had to deny the laws of the market. That human possibilities were limited, not by the laws of the market, but by those of society itself was a recognition reserved to Owen who alone discerned behind the veil of market economy the emergent reality: society. However, his vision was lost again for a century.
Karl Polanyi
The mechanism of the market was asserting itself and clamoring for its completion: human labor had to be made a commodity. Reactionary paternalism had in vain tried to resist this necessity. Out of the horrors of Speenhamland men rushed blindly for the shelter of a utopian market economy.
Karl Polanyi
Actually, the labor market was allowed to retain its main function only on condition that wages and conditions of work, standards and regulations should be such as would safeguard the human character of the alleged commodity, labor. To argue that social legislation, factory laws, unemployment insurance, and, above all, trade unions have not interfered with the mobility of labor and the flexibility of wages, as is sometimes done, is to imply that those institutions have entirely failed in their purpose, which was exactly that of interfering with the laws of supply and demand in respect to human labor, and removing it from the orbit of the market.
Karl Polanyi
Fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function. Hence, it was worldwide, catholic in scope, universal in application; the issues transcended the economic sphere and begot a general transformation of a distinctively social kind. It radiated into almost every field of human activity whether political or economic, cultural, philosophic, artistic, or religious. And up to a point it coalesced with local and topical tendencies. No understanding of the history of the period is possible unless we distinguish between the underlying fascist move and the ephemeral tendencies with which that move fused in different countries.
Karl Polanyi
So this is it, the final chapter, the end of the road. A 47-year political experiment that the British frankly have never been very happy with. My mother and father signed up to a common market, not to a political union, flags, anthems, presidents, and now you even want your own army. For me, it has been 27 years of campaigning and over 20 years here in this parliament. I'm not particularly happy with the agreement we're being asked to vote on tonight. But Boris has been remarkably bold in the last few months... he's promised us there will be no level playing field, and on that basis, I wish him every success in the next round of negotiations, I really do.
Nigel Farage
It was characteristic of the economic system of the nineteenth century that it was institutionally distinct from the rest of society. In a market economy, the production and distribution of material goods is carried on through a self-regulating system of markets, governed by laws of its own, the so-called laws of supply and demand, motivated in the last resort by two simple incentives, fear of hunger and hope of gain. This institutional arrangement is thus separate from the noneconomic institutions of society: its kinship organization and its political and religious systems. Neither the blood tie, nor legal compulsion, nor religious obligation, nor fealty, nor magic created the sociologically defined situations that insured the participation of individuals in the system. They were, rather, the creation of institutions like private property in the means of production and the wage system operating on purely economic incentives.
Karl Polanyi
...the basic fact of Tony Blair's election does make it, in my view, the most exciting Labour choice since the election of Hugh Gaitskell in December 1955. ... The most fundamental presentation issue for the Labour Party is one of openness or inwardness. Nothing does the party more harm than when it turns in on itself in a mood of proletarian sullenness. Tony Blair epitomises the reverse of this. ... I hope he will use this opportunity in favour of sticking to a constructive line on Europe, in favour of sensible constitutional innovation...and in favour of friendly relations with the Liberal Democrats. ... I hope Mr Blair will not lead the Labour Party further in a free-market direction. Good work has been done in freeing it from nationalisation and other policies. But the market cannot solve everything and it would be a pity to embrace the stale dogmas of Thatcherism just when their limitations are becoming obvious.
Roy Jenkins
![[The Common Market is not] a blueprint for European prosperity and stability. ...[it is] the result of a political malaise following upon the failure of Socialists to use the sovereign power of their Parliaments to plan their economic life. ... Socialists cannot at one and the same time call for economic planning and accept the verdict of free competition, no matter how extensive the area it covers. The jungle is not made more acceptable just because it is almost limitless. (Aneurin Bevan)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/87/aneurin-bevan-almost-area-971687.webp)
[A]s long as the rate is fixed the speculator is on a one-way option. As soon as the rate is determined by the market, speculation is equal and opposite at the market rate. One has only to imagine what would be the position-and it is not an entirely out-of-the-way analogy-if there were to be fixed rates on the Stock Exchange. Everyone would know when they were false and did not correspond with the realities. The consequence would be that from time to time we should have to unpeg the fixed rates, with catastrophic changes of value, instead of the market rates being determined by the judgments of all who participate in the market. The same happens with a floating rate for a currency.
Enoch Powell
The collective wisdom and the collective will of the nation resides not in any little Whitehall clique but in the whole mass of the people-in the producers, listening to the voice of the customer at home and abroad; in the savers and investors, using their eyes and their brains to lay out their resources to best advantage; in the consumers themselves, expressing through all the complex nervous system of the market their wishes, their needs, their expectations. In short, the true national economic plan is being made all the time by the very people and institutions which the intellectual arrogance of the Socialist affects to despise. "Under Tory free enterprise" says Labour's policy, "no limit is set to the amount of our national resources and intellectual talent consumed by the popular newspaper, the glossy magazine, the cinema, commercial television and the advertising industry." What a world of contempt for the ordinary man and woman breathes in that haughty sentence!
Enoch Powell
Wages, profits, prices are determined, always have been determined, and always will be determined until we go Communist, by the market-by supply and demand working through the market. While we tie ourselves into knots trying to invent non-market criteria for our commissions to use, the market is there, noiselessly, efficiently, irresistibly doing the job for us all the time. Irresistibly-yes, and there's the rub. For there is one thing outside the market in a modern economy, and that is money itself. Governments can and do satisfy the demand for money, raise and lower the supply of money. In short, governments have the power to control money, which is so largely their own creation. If governments allow monetary demand to increase faster than productivity, the market will not stop the process, because it cannot stop it. The market will simply go on determining wages, profits and prices in ever higher monetary terms-until something busts.
Enoch Powell
You may carry fire and sword into the midst of peace and industry-such a war of the strongest Government in the world against this weak little Republic, and the strongest Government in the world, with untold wealth and inexhaustible resources, will bring you no glory. (Renewed and prolonged cheering.) It will bring you no profit but mischief, and it will be wrong. (Hear, hear.) You may make thousands of women widows and thousands of children fatherless. It will be wrong. (Cheers.) You may add a new province to your Empire. It will still be wrong. (Renewed cheers.) You may give greater buoyancy to the South African stock and share market. (Hear, hear.) You may create South African booms. You may send the price of Mr. Rhodes's Chartereds up to the point beyond the dream of avarice. Yes, even then it will be wrong. (Loud and continued cheering.)
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn
There is a danger that we legislate to feel good, not to do good. Nowhere is this truer than in social legislation. The warm glow comes quickly after passing a piece of law which is designed to raise standards for those in jobs; the chill of lost jobs because of lost competitiveness is felt more slowly. ... We should make our labour markets more flexible and job-friendly, and secure greater skill levels and cost control. That means not introducing new limitations on the labour market.
Douglas Hurd
It's important to recognize the class origins of this project, which occurred in the 1970s when the capitalist class was in a great deal of difficulty, workers were well organized and were beginning to push back. Like any ruling class, they needed ruling ideas. So, the ruling ideas were that freedom of the market, privatization, entrepreneurialism of the self, individual liberty and all the rest of it should be the ruling ideas of a new social order, and that was the order that got implemented in the 1980s and 1990s.
David Harvey
Do not be deluded into believing that the titular heads of the networks control what appears on their networks. They all have better taste. All are responsible to stockholders, and in my experience all are honorable men. But they must schedule what they can sell in the public market.
Edward R. Murrow
You know what you think, you know where you are on the spectrum... You're Left or you're Right really, that's it. And if you're left-wing, you're boring. That's the truth. Nobody wants to hang around with you, you're very dull. You're the voice of conscience, y'know the one saying: "Now look. Put it down, we should all be nice to one another. Let's try and not eat everything today.” Very dull voice... The right-wing... Cruel? Yes. Vicious? Certainly. But honest. Not a sophisticated philosophy, it just says: "What is this? Do we fuck it or eat it? Let's try half and half.”... Now you might be liberal! You could be, I forgot. You could be one of those thoughtful, troublesome people. People who say: "Well things are actually a little bit like this AND a little bit like that. Soooo, let's do whatever you say.” If you're liberal, you have no purpose. You are the thing in your kitchen you never use. Something you bought once, while you were out at a market feeling frisky.
Dylan Moran
Today's big tech companies have too much power - too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy. They've bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else.
With fewer competitors entering the market, the big tech companies do not have to compete as aggressively in key areas like protecting our privacy. And some of these companies have grown so powerful that they can bully cities and states into showering them with massive taxpayer handouts in exchange for doing business, and can act-in the words of [Facebook CEO] Mark Zuckerberg-"more like a government than a traditional company."
Elizabeth Warren
We humans have always defined ourselves by narration. What's happening today is that we're allowing multi-national corporations to tell our stories for us. The theme of corporate stories (and millions drink them in every day) seldom varies: to be happy you must consume, to be special you must conform. Absurd, obviously, yet our identities have become so fragile, so elusive, that we seem content to let advertisers provide us with their version of who we are, to let them recreate us in their image: a cookie-cutter image based on market research, shallow sociology, and insidious lies. Individualism is bad for business – though absolutely necessary for freedom, progressive knowledge, and any possible interface with the transcendent. And yes, it's entirely possible to function as a free-thinking individual without succumbing to narcissism..
Tom Robbins
