From Bob Ellis "First Abolish The Customer: 202 Arguments Against Economic Rationalism" (Penguin:1998)
... a belief all economic rationalists share - that this decisive, sudden process of sacking people is good for society, or good for the society as a whole. By sacking people in their hundreds of thousands, the theory at its heart asserts, you create employment and stimulate spending. p.4
Land mines, not coal mines.
Land mines make more money. p.20
To compete with slaves we must become slaves ourselves, or something very close to slaves. p.35
An economic rationalist would have sacked Michelangelo ...Joern Utzon ... Charlie Chaplin ... Orson Welles ... J R R Tolkien. pp.42-44
Economic rationalism as a system and democracy as a system are incompatible, ultimately incompatible. And one of them has to go. p.47
The greed of a few hundred thousand shareholders now outweighs ... the need and suffering of five billion ordinary people, with rent to pay, and children to clothe and send to school. ... Some people are as disposable as Kleenex. pp.68-69
For competitive wages read slave wages. p.70
One man's profit is another man's loss. p.72
'The foremost problem now facing a modern economy, ' said Syd Hickman ...' is what do you do with the dumb blokes?' p.88
... why any company's profits should be, theoretically, limitless. Why they cannot, like wages, be pegged. p.92
If it is permissible for human beings to harass and humiliate and ruin other human beings in the name of profit, and to do so without let or fine or hindrance, then it is not a democratic system we are talking of, it is a tyranny. pp. 100-101
If a government can make laws hindering the sale of heroin and tobacco merely because they ruin lives and sometimes ends them, why - as a matter of philosophical debate - cannot they make laws that hinder the evils of economic rationalism? it also ruins lives, and ends them. pp.135-136
[Economic rationalists] will buy up the Apple Corporation and sell of its component songs to Michael Jackson for millions. But they would have never bought Paul McCartney his first guitar. p.150
John Ralston Saul in ... The Unconscious Civilization, reports how employees who have narrowly survived the sack that extinguished their workmates and friends become, as a rule, very nervous, and haggard, and overworked, and uncreative. p. 154
Orwell's Animal Farm ... 'All men are equal, but some are more equal than others.' p.162
One man's surplus is another man's deficit. p. 163
There is always an alternative. p.180
Homer Simpson's words, 'Who, whom? Who benefits, Marge?' p.205
Expendable as Kleenex. This is the matter of which we dare not speak, and now it is said. p.209
