Capitalist Property Rights Quotes

“Up until the end of the 16th century, even global trading outfits like the Levant Company were guilds or partnerships, whose members pooled their resources that none could accomplish in isolation. But then, on the September 24, 1599, in a half-timbered building off Moorgate Fields, not far from where Shakespeare was struggling to complete Hamlet, something momentous happened. A company was founded whose ownership was cut up into tiny pieces to be bought and sold freely and anonymously, like pieces of silver. Once could own a piece of the company without being involved of it, indeed without even telling anyone. The first global joint-stock company was thus born, undoubtly Tudor England’s most revolutionary invention. Its name? The East India Company.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“The right to issue unlimited quantities of anonymously tradable shares, along with the institution of a liquid market for them, created something new: corporations with power so immense, it dwarfed that of their countries of origin, and could be deployed in faraway places assiduously to exploit people and resources. Shareholding and well-governed share markets fired up history, separating ownership from the rest of the East India Company’s activities unleashed a fluid, irresistible force. Unchecked, the East India Company grew more powerful than the British state, answerable only to its shareholders. At home, its bureaucracy corrupted and largely controlled Her majesty’s government. Abroad, its 200,000-strong private army oversaw the destruction of well-functioning economies in Asia and a number of Pacific islands and ensured the systematic exploitation of their peoples.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“Liberalism’s fatal hypocrisy […] was to rejoice in the virtuous Jills and Jacks, the neighborhood butchers, bakers and brewers, so as to defend the vile East India Companies, the Facebooks, the Amazons, which know no neighbors, have no partners, respect no moral sentiments [the other book by Adam Smith] and stop at nothing to destroy their competitors.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“The East India Company was no apparition though; it was the template for many subsequent corporations […] Liberals betray themselves […] the moment they turn a blind eye to this kind of hyper-concentrated power. […] This is why trading in apples does not come even close to trading in shares. Large quantities may produce, at worse, lots of bad cider, but large amounts of money invested in liquid shares can release demonic forces that no market or state can control.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“A contemporary commentator drew an analogy between the East India Company’s ownership structure and the River Thames’ splendid flux, which leaves it ‘still the same river, though the parts which compose it are changing every instance.’ Once the property rights over a firm become detached from the people that set it up and work in it, it becomes a corpus in flux. It acquires a liquid life of its own, it can grow out of any human proportion. Indeed, like a river, it becomes potentially immortal.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present