To found a family. I think it would have been easier for me to found an empire.

Making the rich poorer does not make the poor richer, but it does make the state stronger—and it does increase the power of officials and politicians, power more menacing, more permanent and less useful than market power within the rule of law. Inequality of income can only be eliminated at the cost of freedom. The pursuit of income equality will turn this country into a totalitarian slum.

If exclusive privileges were not granted, and if the financial system would not tend to concentrate wealth, there would be few great fortunes and no quick wealth. When the means of growing rich is divided between a greater number of citizens, wealth will also be more evenly distributed; extreme poverty and extreme wealth would be also rare.

He thought an economic policy could be devised that would at once hasten victory and deal with the after-war problems, one that would develop our resources, increase our production of wealth, and provide employment for the people at fair and reasonable wages and conditions of labour. It must also ensure national safety and future commercial and industrial welfare. ... We should endeavour to create a self-contained Empire. (Cheers.) We should no longer be dependent for our raw materials upon an actual or potential enemy. (Renewed cheers.)

A heavy progressive tax upon a very large fortune is in no way such a tax upon thrift or industry as a like would be on a small fortune. No advantage comes either to the country as a whole or to the individuals inheriting the money by permitting the transmission in their entirety of the enormous fortunes which would be affected by such a tax; and as an incident to its function of revenue raising, such a tax would help to preserve a measurable equality of opportunity for the people of the generations growing to manhood. We have not the slightest sympathy with that socialistic idea which would try to put laziness, thriftlessness and inefficiency on a par with industry, thrift and efficiency; which would strive to break up not merely private property, but what is far more important, the home, the chief prop upon which our whole civilization stands. Such a theory, if ever adopted, would mean the ruin of the entire country — a ruin which would bear heaviest upon the weakest, upon those least able to shift for themselves. But proposals for legislation such as this herein advocated are directly opposed to this class of socialistic theories. Our aim is to recognize what Lincoln pointed out: The fact that there are some respects in which men are obviously not equal; but also to insist that there should be an equality of self-respect and of mutual respect, an equality of rights before the law, and at least an approximate equality in the conditions under which each man obtains the chance to show the stuff that is in him when compared to his fellows.

Intelligence and talent are not normally distributed. Leverage magnifies the distinctions.

The capable ones make everyone better off, but themselves most of all.

It’s not that the rich are getting richer, it’s that the “smart, leveraged, and high agency” are getting richer.

If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

We are richer than we think, each one of us.

Are we to be an empire or are we to be only a kingdom? The great Napoleon said that "Providence was always on the side of the big battalions." Do you suppose that is not the same with countries as with armies? The struggle for life, the struggle for existence in future will not be between cities or even between kingdoms. It will be between mighty empires; and the minor States will come off badly if they are left to be crushed between the gigantic bulk of these higher organisations. Our opponents see this truth dimly, because when we come to talk of the prosperity of America and Germany they say, "Yes, that is natural. Are they not greater than us, are they not more numerous?" Then in a sort of despairing fatalism they seem to say, "What can our little England do but fall a victim to the inexorable decrees of fate?" I am not impressed by their pessimism. (Cheers.) I refuse to despair of my country. (Cheers.) Are we not also an empire? (Cries of "Yes.") Are we not as great in area and as great in population, greater in the variety of our products and opportunities than any empire that exists or that the world has ever seen? Yes; but our union is incomplete, and the question which to me is everything is "Will it attain to a higher organisation?" It is impossible that it can remain the same; it must either shrink or it must develop.

Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God's children.

I get the real moronic progressive economic plan now. The more we spend the richer we are. How brilliant... Go figure these idiots.

When we speak of Empire, it is in no spirit of flag-wagging...we feel that in this great inheritance of ours, separated as it is by the seas, we have yet one home and one people...great as the material benefits are, we do not look primarily to them. I think deep down in all our hearts we look to the Empire as the means by which we may hope to see that increase of our race which we believe to be of such inestimable benefit to the world at large; the spread abroad of people to whom freedom and justice are as the breath of their nostrils, of people distinguished, as we would fain hope and believe, above all things, by an abiding sense of duty. If ever the day should come when an appeal to that sense of duty falls on deaf ears among our own kin, that day indeed would be the end of our country and of our Empire, to which you and I have dedicated our very lives.

we feel that we don't want abstract equality rights, we want material equality. That means the redistribution of the wealth in this society. And that means that people like Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Ford or the Bishop Estate or Dillingham or whatever, they have to redistribute the wealth that they have robbed from the poor working people of the world. I mean, they made if off our backs. Henry Ford, he made the first Model T. After that, who made all the other cars. So it wasn't him, it was the people who work in the automobile factories, who sweat in 100 degree temperatures; who risk industrial accidents for a lousy $150 a week. And he makes millions every year. And he ain't produced shit. I mean, he just sits behind his desk and writes papers, either that or signs checks. That's the reality of the way society functions. And what we say, we do want a redistribution of that wealth-spread it among the people it's been robbed from. Return it to the people it belongs to.