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The myth that holds that the great corporation is the puppet of the market, the powerless servant of the consumer, is, in fact one of the devices by which its power is perpetuated.

John Kenneth Galbraith

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John Kenneth Galbraith
Age: 97 †
Born: 1908
Born: October 15
Died: 2006
Died: April 29
Diplomat
Economist
Non-Fiction Writer
Politician
University Teacher
John K. Galbraith
Power
Holds
Great
Servant
Perpetuated
Consumers
Puppet
Corporations
Puppets
Myth
Corporation
Market
Consumer
Fact
Powerless
Facts
Devices

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There is little that can be said about most economic goods. A toothbrush does little but clean teeth. Aspirin does little but dull pain. Alcohol is important mostly for making people more or less drunk ... There being so little to be said, much is to be invented.
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The inborn instability of capitalism has been part of the history of the system for several hundred years.
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All crises have involved debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment.
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This is a world inhabited not by people who have to be persuaded to believe but by people who want an excuse to believe.
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Who is king in the world of the blind when there isn't even a one eyed man?
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Complexity and obscurity have professional value - they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery.
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Both we and the Soviets face the common threat of nuclear destruction and there is no likelihood that either capitalism or communism will survive a nuclear war.
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Economic theory is the most prestigious subject of instruction and study. Agricultural economics, labor economics and marketing are lower caste fields of study.
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Any country that has Milton Friedman as an adviser has nothing to fear from a few million Arabs.
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The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.
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For the sake of The Progressive, I will say that [Robert] La Follette was relevant, but he was the last.
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A wrong decision isn't forever it can always be reversed. The losses from a delayed decision are forever they can never be retrieved.
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A good rule of conversation is never answer a foolish question.
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If you're rich you can buy books. If you're poor, you need a library.
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There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.
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We live surrounded by a systematic appeal to a dream world which all mature, scientific reality would reject. We, quite literally, advertise our commitment to immaturity, mendacity and profound gullibility. It is as the hallmark of the culture. And it is justified as being economically indispensable.
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Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Walther Frank, Julius Streicher and Robert Ley did pass under my inspectionand interrogation in 1945 but they only proved that National Socialism was a gangster interlude at a rather low order of mental capacity and with a surprisingly high incidence of alcoholism.
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When you see reference to a new paradigm you should always, under all circumstances, take cover.
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I was brought up in southwestern Ontario where we were taught that Canadian patriotism should not withstand anything more than a five-dollar-a-month wage differential. Anything more than that and you went to Detroit.
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A very complicated mass of things influences the economy - the speculative effect, government policy, consumer borrowing and spending, the level of technical innovation (which I concede, although everyone emphasizes it too much), and much more - including, of course, the rate of inflation.
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