"I expect all the bad consequences from the chambers of Commerce and manufacturers establishing in different parts of this country, which your Grace seems to foresee. . . . The regulations of Commerce are commonly dictated by those who are most interested to deceive and impose upon the Public."
Adam Smith, 1785 letter. In The Correspondence of Adam Smith. 1974. 2nd ed., 1985. Edited by E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross. Indianapolis: LibertyPress, 1987, p. 286.
"The rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes, many of our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought us to make them richer by acts of Congress."
Andrew Jackson (1830) Cited by Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America 1815-1846. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 62
"Many key businessmen articulated a conscious policy favoring the intervention of the naitonal government into the economy . . . important businesmen did not, on the whole, regard politics as a necessary evil, but as an important part of their larger position in society."
Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism. New York: The Free Press, 1963, p.5.
"Capitalism's biggest political enemies are not the firebrand trade unionists spewing vitriol against the system but the executives in pin-striped suits extolling the virtues of competitive markets with every breath while attempting to extinguish them with every action."
Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists. New York: Crown Business, 2003, p. 276.
The point is the unholy alliance between big business and government which has basically perverted the founders view of representative democracy.
The sixteen years of the Clinton and Bush administrations institutionalized this fascist version of government to an extent that is truly amazing.
