“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

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

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it incom…" by Kalle Lasn?

Kalle Lasn 7

Estonian-Canadian film maker, author, magazine editor and a… 1942

Related quotes

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

“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.

“All the sadder that Stone, on the brink of his greatest work, turned one day and went off to live in a town we shall call Obscurity by the sea best named The Past.”

Ray Bradbury book The October Country

The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone (1954)
The October Country (1955)

“How inappropriate to call this planet "Earth," when it is clearly "Ocean.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

“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]