Just look at corn and soybeans, subsidized with taxpayer money — creating a market that wouldn’t otherwise make sense. Why? So agribusiness firms have cheap inputs to make processed food. The taxpayers are basically subsidizing corporations to make crap, when we could have grown real food on our own.

America pays defense contractors to build aircraft carriers. Google pays brilliant programmers to do whatever the hell they want.

You might not think it, but it was always the farmers who raised hell in this country. They worked for themselves, were self-reliant, and weren’t about to take shit from anybody. But then some clever bastard figured out how to make crops inedible. My family’s been doing industrial farming for forty years and all it produces is debt, pollution, and water shortages. It ruins the land and the people on it.

One of the most productive ways a government can spend money on the people is by building more prisons. That’s what makes the US so great. That’s what freedom is all about.

For the sake of “job creation,” in Kentucky, and in other backward states, we have lavished public money on corporations that come in and stay only so long as they can exploit people here more cheaply than elsewhere. The general purpose of the present economy is to exploit, not to foster or conserve. (from 'Compromise, Hell!' published in the November/December 2004 issue of ORION magazine)

We’ll use technology to produce commodities, and we’ll make

Oil extraction is much more capital-intensive than it is labor-intensive — which means it doesn’t produce a lot of lasting jobs. But in the end, it does produce big revenues when it’s sold on the global market. That sets the stage for grand-scale corruption of the political class: people who can maneuver themselves into getting a cut of that sale price of oil will find themselves quickly rich, whether or not they actually expend any effort to pump the stuff out of the ground.

The very earth that sustains us is being destroyed to fuel injustice. An economy that grants personhood to corporations but denies it to the more-than-human beings

All varieties of the producers' policy are advocated on the ground of their alleged ability to raise the party members' standard of living. Protectionism and economic self-sufficiency, labor union pressure and compulsion, labor legislation, minimum wage rates, public spending, credit expansion, subsidies, and other makeshifts are always recommended by their advocates as the most suitable or the only means to increase the real income of the people for whose votes they canvass. Every contemporary statesman or politician invariably tells his voters: My program will make you as affluent as conditions may permit, while my adversaries' program will bring you want and misery.

They made a simple enough mistake. The same one we’re making. They founded their society on resource extraction, and in doing so, inflated their population beyond the carrying capacity of the land.

what do they want with our land? They do not want it at all; it is not the land they want; they have no use for American land. What they want is the income that they know they can in a little while get from it. Where does that income come from? It comes from labour, from the labour of American citizens. What we are selling to these people is our children, not land.

"Everything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for. The world is full of so- called economists who in turn are full of schemes for getting something for nothing. They tell us that the government can spend and spend without taxing at all; that it can continue to pile up debt without ever paying it off, because "we owe it to ourselves.

All pursuit of commodity production becomes at the same time pursuit of the exploitation of labour-power; but only capitalist commodity production is an epoch-making mode of exploitation, which in the course of its historical development revolutionizes the entire economic structure of society by its organization of the labour process and its gigantic extension of technique, and towers incomparably above all earlier epochs.

Who subsidizes the consumers will depend upon the incidence of taxation. But men in their role of taxpayers will be subsidizing themselves in their role of consumers. It becomes a little difficult to trace in this maze precisely who is subsidizing whom. What is forgotten is that subsidies are paid for by someone, and that no method has been discovered by which the community gets something for nothing.