“I can now present the first fundamental law of capitalism, which links the capital stock to the flow of income from capital. The capital/income ratio β is related in a simple way to the share of income from capital in national income, denoted α. The formula is
α = r × β
Where r is the rate of return on capital.
For example, if β=600% and r = 5%, then α = r × β = 30%.
In other words, if national wealth represents the equivalent of six years of national income, and the rate of return on capital is 5 percent per year, then capital’s share in national income is 30 percent.”

— Thomas Piketty, book Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Source: Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), p. 52.

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Thomas Piketty24

French economist 1971

Harvey S. Rosen (1949) American economist

Source: Public Finance - International Edition - Sixth Edition, Chapter 19, Taxes on Consumption and Wealth, p. 453

“When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.”

Thomas Piketty book Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Source: Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), p. 1.

“Generally speaking, under capitalism, the ownership of capital is separate from the application of capital to production; money capital is separate from industrial or productive capital; the rentier, living entirely on income obtained from money capital, is separated from the entrepreneur and from all those directly concerned in the management of capital.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Source: Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Chapter Three

“How do wealth-income and capital-output ratios evolve in the long run, and why? Until recently it was difficult to properly address this question, for one simple reason: national accounts were mostly about ﬂows, not stocks. Economists had at their disposal a large body of historical series on ﬂows of output, income and consumption – but limited data on stocks of assets and liabilities. When needed, for example for growth accounting exercises, estimates of capital stocks were typically obtained by cumulating past ﬂows of saving and investment. This is ﬁne for some purposes, but severely limits the set of questions one can ask.”

Thomas Piketty (1971) French economist

Piketty, Thomas, and Gabriel Zucman. Capital is back: Wealth-income ratios in rich countries, 1700-2010 http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/PikettyZucman2013WP.pdf. Centre for Economic Policy Research, 2013.

“Friendship lives on its income, love devours its capital.”

Arsène Houssaye (1814–1896) French writer

Source: James O'Donnell Bennett (1908) When Good Fellows Get Together, p. 147

“I am a libertarian with a small "l" and a Republican with a capital "R".”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

Charlie Rose Show (November 2005) http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-921891628093252478&q=tvshow%3ACharlie_Rose <br class="br">Context: I am a libertarian with a small "l" and a Republican with a capital "R". And I am a Republican with a capital "R" on grounds of expediency, not on principle.

“Make no mistake, the point of cutting the personal income tax and the capital gains cut is to send an unmistakable message to business.”

Bill Richardson (1947) politician and governor from the United States

upon passage of supply side tax cuts
[Phil, Magers, http://www.upi.com/archive/view.php?archive=1&StoryID=20030219-071745-7704r, "New Mexico cuts taxes to stimulate economy", United Press International, 2003-02-19, 2006-08-21]

“So long as we confine our attention to income from property, and leave out of account any increment or decrement in the value of prospects due to changes in people's own earning power (accumulation or decumulation of “Human Capital”), Income No. 1 ex post is not a subjective affair, like other kinds of income; it is almost completely objective.”

John Hicks (1904–1989) British economist

178-9
Value and capital, (1939)

“We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned oil from the earth as if it possessed an infinite supply. We've sold off our planet's natural capital and called it income. And now the earth, like the economy, is stripped.”

Kalle Lasn (1942) Estonian-Canadian film maker, author, magazine editor and activist

Hey President Obama http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/82/obama_economics.html/. Adbusters (March 24, 2009).

“We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income.”

Kalle Lasn (1942) Estonian-Canadian film maker, author, magazine editor and activist

And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned oil from the earth as if it possessed an infinite supply. We've sold off our planet's natural capital and called it income. And now the earth, like the economy, is stripped. <br class="br"> Hey President Obama http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/82/obama_economics.html/. Adbusters (March 24, 2009).

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