Home/Recent kwiples > Issues >

capitalism

Wednesday 10th of June 2026

By the numbers Percentage change in median CEO compensation for S&P 500 companies last year: +6.6 In median shareholder returns: −5.8  Harper's Index, August 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Capitalism Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell. Frank Borman © 2024 Kwiple.com
Capitalism Get Rich or Die Tryin' Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson © 2020 Kwiple.com
Capitalism Here then is the transfer to Chinese soil lock, stock and barrel of the dual systems of management control that define contemporary American capitalism: the transfer of Business Process Reengineering, with its shaping of horizontal business processes in both manufacturing and services, and Corporate Panoptics, with its empowerment of top management with the electronic representations of the corporate organism in its entirety and in real time. Simon Head, Mindless © 2016 Kwiple.com
Capitalism In capitalism, the progressive is the one who slows down the rate at which you get poorer. Ted Rall, September 2, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Capitalism It's All about the Benjamins Puff Daddy and The Family © 2020 Kwiple.com
Capitalism The priority of capitalists is not the election of Republicans. It is the maintenance of public support for capitalism. If this is best achieved through some redistribution and regulation, it would not be the first time. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, March 13, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Capitalism Remember that time is money. Benjamin Franklin, “Advice to a Young Tradesman” © 2020 Kwiple.com
Capitalism The true contradiction of capitalism is this: it's very success in satisfying a powerful human drive toward the ever-increasing consumption of the outputs of capitalist enterprise contradicts another and even more powerful human drive. This is the drive to seek happiness or, if you prefer, a sense of well-being. Robert A. Dahl, On Political Equality © 2018 Kwiple.com
Capitalism Unfettred capitalism is what we should desire in this country. Unfettred capitalism is what made this country great in the industrial revolution. Carnegie and, umh, uh, the other men who built this country in the late 1800s. I'm blanking. J. P. Morgan … uh, the rest of them. Rockefeller. There's a name. Graham Ledger, news anchor of OAN's The Daily Ledger © 2020 Kwiple.com
Capitalism What I am opposed to is the sort of capitalism that sucks the life out of a whole bunch of the citizenry and then demands that they do better with whatever they have left. Linda Tirado, Hand to Mouth  © 2016 Kwiple.com
Capitalists When it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will vie with each other for the rope contract. Attributed to Vladimir Lenin © 2021 Kwiple.com
Capitalists say The only training worth paying for is paying your current job holders to train their H-1B replacements © 2017 Kwiple.com
Class struggle The social conflicts which  which industrial life must have fomented,  and which were so terrible in the Flanders  of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,  were already in embryo in the very period of city evolution [in the 11th century].  The antagonism between capital and labor is thereby revealed to be as old as the middle class. Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities © 2023 Kwiple.com
Crony capitalism Crony capitalism … is an “instrumental union between capitalists and politicians designed to allow the former to acquire wealth, legally or otherwise, and the latter to seek and retain power.” In essence, it is a form of oligarchy. Ganesh Sitaraman, The Great Democracy © 2020 Kwiple.com
Ethics The capitalist and consumerist ethics are two sides of the same coin, a merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!’ Uyval Noah Harari, Sapiens © 2016 Kwiple.com
Gig economy Most sharing-economy workers make under $500 a month from such firms, according to data collected by consumer-lending startup Earnest. … While the paltry sum reflects how many people are just dabbling (as opposed to working full-time), it also highlights how tricky it can be to earn a living at companies that don't actually “hire” workers. … It's perhaps telling that Airbnb paid out the most on average–$926–per month. Returns on capital (rather than labor) are pretty good these days. fortune.com, June 27, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Global warming US investors’ enthusiasm for green investments has begun to wane in the face of repeated attacks on “woke capitalism” by Republicans, in a growing contrast to the billions still pouring into sustainable strategies in Europe. Funds marketed with a sustainable label were hit with $12.4bn in net outflows in the US in the past 12 months even as green funds in Europe added $126.3bn, according to the data provider Morningstar. Financial Times, April 28, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Industrial policy In general, nothing about empowering the state to make critical investments necessariy implies empowering the workers manning those projects or labor at large.  Taking this critique seriously could produce yet another moral capitalism, in a guise and policy combination not yet tried. Osita Nwanevn, New York Review of Books, September 22, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Inequality American economic luck ran out when an economic order that had generated a fair degree of equality among white male citizens without much planning, regulation or deliberate collective decision was replaced by the revolutionary new order of corporate capitalism. … [T]he agrarian socioeconomic order was destined to be wholly superseded by corporate capitalism. As an unregulated external force, corporate capitalism would automatically generate acute inequalities in the distribution of property as well as other social and economic resources. Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy © 2018 Kwiple.com
Kwiple dictionary entrepreneur (än'trə prə nûr’), n. What owners of software platforms for service industries call workers who depend on the platform to get work, who use their own assets, and who assume all work-related risks. © 2015 Kwiple.com
Kwiple dictionary vulture capitalist (vul'chə kap'i tl ist), n. A financial terrorist specializing in raping impoverished or bankrupt debtors, thereby proving he is — not has — the biggest dick on Wall Street. Ironically called a holdout. © 2015 Kwiple.com
Making money the old-fashioned way Owning a store on Main Street © 2016 Kwiple.com
Making money the new-fashioned way Being a vulture capitalist/financial terrorist © 2016 Kwiple.com
Making money the new-fashioned way Demanding clawbacks from workers © 2016 Kwiple.com
Markets A market economy inevitably and frequently inflicts serious harm on some citizens. By producing great inequalities in resources among citizens, market capitalism also fosters political inequality among the citizens of a democratic country. Robert A. Dahl, On Political Equality © 2018 Kwiple.com
Mergers and acquistions Rule #1: Sacrifice everyone else on the altar of preferred shareholders © 2015 Kwiple.com
Psychopaths say I am confident I will prevail. The allegations against me are baseless and without merit. Martin Shkreli, after being arrested for allegedly misleading investors in his hedge fund and looting his publicly traded company © 2015 Kwiple.com
Regulations If the economic history of the past two centuries tells us anything, it is that state regulation is absolutely essential to insure a reasonable level of market competition, to reduce the harm other- wise caused by unregulated firms and markets, and to insure a more just, or at least more acceptable, distribution of the benefits. Without state regulation, political elites and the public at large would soon sweep private business firms and markets into that well-known dustbin of history. Robert A. Dahl, On Political Equality © 2018 Kwiple.com
Republicans say  Healthcare is a product like any other, to be sold only to those who can afford it © 2017 Kwiple.com
Sex A comparative sociological study of East and West Germany conducted after reunification in 1990 found that Eastern women had twice as many orgasms as Western women. Researchers marveled at this disparity in reported sexual satisfaction, especially since East German women suffered from the notorious double burden of formal employment and housework. In contrast, postwar West German women had stayed home and enjoyed all the labor-saving devices produced by the roaring capitalist economy. But they had less sex, and less satisfying sex, than women who had to line up for toilet paper. Kristen R. Ghodsee © 2019 Kwiple.com
Sleepers at the wheel The United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division  © 2017 Kwiple.com
Sleepers at the wheel say Company directors are obligated to maximize shareholder value © 2015 Kwiple.com
Socialism The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned “merely” with profit but also with “social” ends; that business has a “social conscience” and takes seriously its responsibility for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are – or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously – preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. Milton Friedman © 2019 Kwiple.com
State of the union c Labor can't strike, but capital goes on investment strikes by threatening to move if its demands for wage cuts, tax cuts, subsidies, negligent regulatory regimes, union-free workplaces and judicial toadies aren't met © 2017 Kwiple.com
Tech bros say If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer – you're the product © 2017 Kwiple.com
Tech bros say Keep the voting stock for ourselves © 2016 Kwiple.com
Trust Trust is to capitalism what alcohol is to wedding receptions: a social lubricant. In low-trust societies (Russia, southern Italy), economic growth is constrained. People who don’t trust other people think twice before investing in, collaborating with, or hiring someone who isn’t a family member (or a member of their criminal gang). The concept may sound squishy, but the effect isn’t. Jerry Useem, The Atlantic, November 24, 2021 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality  Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor saying © 2017 Kwiple.com
 
Welfare state There is a plausible future in which a more generous welfare state, funded by taxes on those who have been  enriched by a decade's asset inflation, drains some of the anti-capitalist pus from the body politic. There is no plausible future in which another round of unreconstructed supply-side economics does the same. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, March 13, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com