43 Quotes by Nancy MacLean

Today the big lie of the Koch-sponsored radical right is that society can be split between makers and takers, justifying on the part of the makers a Manichaean struggle to disarm and defeat those who would take from them.

Months before a conservative Congress passed the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, called “the Slave Labor Act” by critics and passed over President Harry Truman’s veto, the state’s governor had signed a pioneering “right-to-work” law to weaken labor unions.

Democracy,” the towering African American historian John Hope Franklin observed in the midst of World War II, “is essentially an act of faith.”96 When that faith is willfully exterminated, we should not be surprised that we reap the whirlwind. The public choice way of thinking, one sage critic warned at the time James Buchanan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, is not simply “descriptively inaccurate” – indeed, “a terrible caricature” of how the political process works.

For all its fine phrases, what this cause really seeks is a return to oligarchy, to a world in which both economic and effective political power are to be concentrated in the hands of a few. It would like to reinstate the kind of political economy that prevailed in America at the opening of the twentieth century, when the mass disfranchisement of voters and the legal treatment of labor unions as illegitimate enabled large corporations and wealthy individuals.

During the boom, Chile’s economic gains had been privatized; now, in the crunch, the country’s losses were socialized.

This is among the most profound shifts in our legal history,” warns a Reagan-appointed federal judge. His words bear slow reading: “Ominously, business has a good chance of opting out of the legal system altogether and misbehaving without reproach.” A subsequent headline noted that it amounts to a “Privatization of the Justice System.”73.

Democratic processes are held back by authoritarian trammels,” President Bachelet complained in 2014. “We want a constitution without locks and bolts.”50.

By 1860, two of every three of the relatively few Americans whose wealth surpassed $100,000 lived below the Mason-Dixon Line. New York at that time had fewer millionaires per capita than Mississippi. South Carolina was the richest state in the Union. The source of southern wealth was staple crops – particularly cotton – produced by enslaved men, women, and children for world markets. So matchless were the profits that more money was invested in slaves than in industry and railroads.

For all its fine phrases, what this cause really seeks is a return to oligarchy, to a world in which both economic and effective political power are to be concentrated in the hands of a few.