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Change for the better :
When
the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance,
there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able
to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have
hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some
of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the
highest virtues. We shall…dare to assess the money-motive at its
true value. The love of money as a possession…will be recognised for
what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those
semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over
with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease ...[J M Keynes, ‘The Future’, Essays
in Persuasion 1931]
Unhappy
events…have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a
democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a
democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private
power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state
itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government
by an individual, by a group. [Franklin D Roosevelt, message
to the US Congress 1938]
In a system of production, where the entire continuity of the reproduction process rests upon credit, a crisis must obviously occur — a tremendous rush for means of payment — when credit suddenly ceases and only cash payments have validity. [Karl Marx, Capital III, p 490]
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