Top 138 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Craig Roberts

Despite massive evidence to the contrary, libertarians hold tight to their romantic concept of capitalism, which, freed from government interference, serves the consumer with the best products at the lowest prices.

The road to economic well-being is to reward productive economic activity and to provide a moderate and predictable growth of money to finance real economic growth without reigniting the fires of inflation.

I have come to the conclusion that the West is a vast lie machine for the secret agendas of vested interests.

The neoconservative ideology supports American financial and military-political imperialism or hegemony.

I have no sympathy for debunking human achievements that, in the end, gave ordinary people liberty.

Marx and Lenin were ahead of their time. Marx wrote before offshoring of jobs and the financialization of the economy. Lenin presided over a communist revolution that jumped the gun by taking place in a country in which feudal elements still predominated over capitalism.

Both political parties, Republicans and Democrats, are dependent on the same private interest groups for campaign funds, so both parties dance to the same masters.

Marxism is a success because it fuses the two inconsistent strains in Western thought - moral skepticism and moral indignation - and makes them complements in the attack against existing society.

The real Social Security crisis is that the government does not have the money to redeem its IOUs.

Washington's impulsive use of power is a danger to America and to the world.

The public subsidies provided to miners, loggers, and ranchers are as extravagant and as harmful to the public interest as the subsidies that the Federal Reserve and Treasury provide to the 'banks too big to fail.'

Few, if any, corporations absorb the full cost of their operations. Corporations shove many of their costs onto the environment, the public sector, and distant third parties.

The great problem with corporate capitalism is that publicly owned companies have short time horizons. Unlike a privately owned business, the top executives of a publicly owned corporation generally come to their positions late in life. Consequently, they have a few years in which to make their fortune.

The Soviet Union was a partial check on capitalist looting in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. However, with the Soviet collapse, capitalist looting intensified during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes.

The government, of course, will print money to bail out the banks' uncovered casino bets, but not to bail out the elderly from the theft of their funds.

Marxism is the only doctrine that both satisfies the demands for progress and provides a safe outlet for moral expression in a skeptical age.

Offshoring manufacturing jobs left Americans with fewer high-value-added, well-paid jobs, and the U.S. middle class downsized. Ladders of upward mobility were taken down. Income and wealth distributions worsened.

The Golden Rule is to 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' Allegedly, America is a Christian country. This means that Christian America is following Jesus' Sermon on the Mount in a masochistic way.

The propagandistic American 'media' and the crazed neoconservatives have set humanity on the path to destruction.

Looting is the only way left for the Western financial system to make money.

As the U.S. is import-dependent, this will translate into higher domestic prices.

The unambigious fact is that U.S. capitalism is a mechanism for looting the many for the benefit of the few.

The champions of globalism are the champions of America's destruction.

Clearly America is exceptional in its immorality, lack of human compassion, and disrespect for law and its founding document.

There are no free financial markets in America or, for that matter, anywhere in the Western word, and few, if any, free markets of any other kind.

Jobs offshoring began with manufacturing, but the rise of the high-speed Internet made it possible to move offshore tradable professional skills, such as software engineering, information technology, various forms of engineering, architecture, accounting, and even the medical reading of MRIs and CT-Scans.

As the dollar's exchange value declines, so will the value of dollar-denominated financial instruments, regardless of how many bonds the Federal Reserve purchases.

When I met with Chinese policymakers in 2006, I advised them that there was a limit to how long they could rely on the U.S. consumer market, as jobs offshoring was destroying it.

We need a memorial day to commemorate the victims of neoliberal globalization.

I have come to the conclusion that capitalism is successful primarily because it can impose the majority of the costs associated with its economic activities on outside parties and on the environment.

The financial markets are rigged by the big banks, the Federal Reserve, and the Treasury in the interests of the profits of the few big banks and the dollar's exchange value, which is the basis of U.S. power.

I have argued that the Soviet story is one of the interaction of speculative excess or utopian aspirations with refractory reality.

Washington is a black hole into which all sanity is sucked out of government deliberations.

Under Reagan's policies, inflation and nominal GNP growth shriveled much faster than predicted, throwing off government revenue estimates and resulting in budget deficits.

Paul Krugman, a professor at MIT and a consultant to the IMF, the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Trilateral Commission, is certainly a member of the establishment.

It is impossible to work out a reduction in nuclear threat as long as one side is going all out to demonize the other.

Progressives regard government as the white knight that protects the public from the greed of capitalists. If only.

The Western media is a Ministry of Truth that operates full-time in support of the artificial existence that Westerners live inside The Matrix where Westerners exist without thought. Considering their inaptitude and inaction, Western peoples might as well not exist.

The way to attack the entitlements problem is to bring the jobs home. This could be done by taxing corporations according to the location, domestic or foreign, at which they add value to their product.

In the Matrix in which Americans live, nothing is ever their fault.

Corporations and Wall Street in pursuit of short-term profits have given the economy away.

In the U.S., society and the environment have to pick up the tab produced by capitalist activity.

The American people and the entire world need to understand that the threat to life on earth resides in Washington and that until Washington is fundamentally and totally changed, this threat will remain as the worse threat to life on earth.

In 2004, I predicted in a nationally televised conference in Washington, D.C., that the U.S. would be a Third World country in 20 years.

Many foolish people believe that nuclear war cannot happen, because there can be no winner. However, the American war planners, who elevated U.S. nuclear weapons from a retaliatory role to a pre-emptive first strike function, obviously do not agree that nuclear war cannot be won.

Trump has more understanding and insight than his opponents realize. For a man such as Trump to risk acquiring so many powerful enemies and to risk his wealth and reputation, he had to have known that the people's dissatisfaction with the ruling establishment meant he could be elected president.

The U.S. is ruled by private interest groups and by the neoconservative ideology that history has chosen the U.S. as the 'exceptional and indispensable' country with the right and responsibility to impose its will on the world.

The concentration of U.S. income and wealth in the hands of the very rich is a new development in my lifetime.

If all countries are exceptional, the word loses its meaning.

Clearly the climate is changing, whether caused by CO2 emissions or some other cause.

A government that cannot survive truth and must resort to stamping out truth is not a government that any country wants.

Once a country descends into evil, it doesn't emerge.

There is no independent American print or TV media.

The human capital of most macroeconomists, heavily invested in demand management, was wiped out by the policy failures of the 1970s.

The Transatlantic and Transpacific Trade and Investment Partnerships have nothing to do with free trade. 'Free trade' is used as a disguise to hide the power these agreements give to corporations to use lawsuits to overturn sovereign laws of nations that regulate pollution, food safety, GMOs, and minimum wages.

Putin does not lie. When he says something, he means it.

By offshoring the production of their products, U.S. corporations transferred technology, physical plant, and business knowhow to China.

The office of U.S. Trade Representative was created in order to permit corporations to write law that serves only their interests.

Vice is Washington's signature. A fish rots from the head, and Washington has led our country into vice, greed, selfishness, and the mockery and destruction of human life.

Representing the people is not something 'our' representatives do. They are too busy representing a handful of private interest groups such as the financial sector, the military/security complex, and agribusiness.