“The Predatory State is an economic system where entire sectors have been built up to feast upon public systems built originally for public purposes and largely serving the middle class. The corporate republic simply administers the spoils system. On a day-to-day basis, the business of its leadership is to deliver favors to their clients. These range from coal companies to sweatshop operators to military contractors.”
Source: The Predatory State, 2008, p. 146-7
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James K. Galbraith 5
economist 1952Related quotes

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 6, Reckoning, p. 153

1970s, Two Cheers for Capitalism (1978)

Source: The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order - Second Edition - (2003), Chapter 12, The Post War Economic Destruction of Vietnam, p. 177

The Question of Liberty in America
About California's 1978 Proposition 13 which limits tax increases without public approval
1970s

“Technological systems, like all cultural systems, must have some built-in stability.”
Source: The lever of riches: Technological creativity and economic progress, 1992, p. 327

Human Nature and Social Theory (1969)
Context: One will be conducive to cooperation and solidarity another social structure to competition, suspiciousness, avarice; another to child-like receptiveness, another to destructive aggressiveness. All empirical forms or human needs and drives have to be understood as results of the social practice (in the last analysis based on the productive forces, class structure, etc., etc.) but they all have to fulfill the functions which are inherent in man’s nature in general, and that is to permit him to relate himself to others and share a common frame of reference, etc. The existential contradiction within man (to which I would now add also the contradiction between limitations which reality imposes on his life, and the virtually limitless imagination which his brain permits him to follow) is what I believe to be one of the motives of psychological and social dynamics. Man can never stand still. He must find solutions to this contradiction, and ever better solutions to the extent to which reality enables him.
The question then arises whether there is an optimal solution which can be inferred from man’s nature, and which constitutes a potential tendency in man. I believe that such optimal solutions can be inferred from the nature of man, and I have recently found it quite useful to think in terms of what in sociology and economy is now often called »system analysis«. One might start with the idea, in the first place, that human personality — just like society — is a system, that is to say, that each part depends on every other, and no part can be changed unless all or most other parts are also changed. A system is better than chaos. If a society system disintegrates or is destroyed by blows from the outside the society ends in chaos, and a completely new society is built upon its ruins, often using the elements of the destroyed system to build the new. That has happened many times in history. But, what also happens is that the society is not simply destroyed but that the system is changed, and a new system emerges which can be considered to be a transformation of the old one.

1960, Address at Convention Hall, Philadelphia

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Five, "A Brief Treatise on the Moral Grounds of Moral Relations", p. 95