Steven Pearlstein Quotes

Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it—because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords.

So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings, goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury, and make sharper the contest between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.

The greatest issue before the people—the question of special privilege and unequal distribution of wealth.

The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Triumphant capitalism has unleashed a powerful drive toward inequality, not improvement, in the social sphere.

The whole policy of the Cotton dynasty tends necessarily to making broader the chasm between these orders is most apparent. It makes the rich richer, and the poor poorer; for, as, according to the creed of the dynasty, capital should own labor, and the labor thus owned can alone successfully produce cotton.

The gap between aspiration and reality could hardly be wider. Today, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country. Study after study has exposed the myth that America is a land of opportunity. This is especially tragic: While Americans may differ on the desirability of equality of outcomes, there is near-universal consensus that inequality of opportunity is indefensible.

If we look at the past two centuries of economic history in Europe and the United States, we see an astounding pattern. Capital will accumulate in a tiny portion of the population, no matter what we do.

The issue of wealth inequality is ... the great moral issue of our time.

one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all.

There’s just too much money in the hands of too few.

There is a profound unfairness embedded in the economic system.

... the wrong and evils of the money-piling tendency of our country ... giving all power to the rich and bringing in pauperism.

This society cannot go forward, the way we have been going forward, where the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing.

…of all the causes of seditions and changes in the Republic, there is none greater than the excessive wealth of a few subjects, and the extreme poverty of the majority.

One of the glaring failures of capitalism is the continuing widespread existence of poverty - often extreme poverty. Even in the advanced economies, many millions of people endure terrible economic and social deprivation, despite the incredible wealth all around them.

The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.

Equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists… we are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already”

Like Venice’s oligarchs, America’s super-rich are destroying the social mobility that creates wealth.

The economy will bump along, with most of us struggling to make ends meet, while the same people who nearly wrecked the economy altogether will be making more money than they can count.

When great wealth collects the way it has in the last two decades, it develops an arrogance…. You see it in the development of a survival of the fittest philosophy, one that says markets are more important than democracy.

This country is very good at creating wealth, but not very good at distributing it.

Today, half of the national income goes to the richest 10 percent. In 2007, the top 1 percent controlled 34.6 percent of the wealth—significantly more than the bottom 90 percent who control just 26.9 percent.

The burning issue of our time is the growing inequality in income and wealth in our country.

We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained.