Kim Phillips-Fein > Quotes

“Irénée, the middle of the three brothers and the most politically passionate, complained that the new Securities and Exchange Commission, created to regulate the financial markets, marked an attempt to change human nature, disrupting the inevitable risks at the heart of life: “Men are by nature speculators, and Nature enforces the necessity of speculation on all of us.” Pierre argued that the Roosevelt administration’s opposition to child labor meant government interference with the intimate details of domestic life: “No Federal law or constitutional amendment will abolish child labor unless the parents in the community are convinced that child labor should not exist.”
― Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal

“Give the votes to the people who have no property, and they will sell them to the rich who will be able to buy them.”
― Kim Phillips-Fein, Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight against Equality in America

“to go directly to Washington’s salary. “History is to know two Washingtons, one white, the other black, both Fathers of their People,” Carnegie wrote.”
― Kim Phillips-Fein, Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight against Equality in America

“Food, raiment, and habitations, the indispensable wants of all, are not to be obtained without the continual toil of ninety-nine in a hundred of mankind.”
― Kim Phillips-Fein, Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight against Equality in America

“This belief in the basic need for hierarchy and in the inferiority of the working class appears, with variations, around the world. But it is especially notable in American history.”
― Kim Phillips-Fein, Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight against Equality in America

“The early nineteenth century gave Americans one other language with which to defend economic inequality: the framework of hierarchy that was innate to a slave society.”
― Kim Phillips-Fein, Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight against Equality in America

“While the city’s financial problems were real enough, its elected leaders’ evasion of these political arguments—the attempt to use debt to settle problems that were at heart political—was the deeper failure.”
― Kim Phillips-Fein, Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics