Fundamentally I argue in Free Lunch what's happened is, that a narrow segment of our society, large corporations which are immortal and amoral... The… - David Cay Johnston
" "Fundamentally I argue in Free Lunch what's happened is, that a narrow segment of our society, large corporations which are immortal and amoral... They're necessary, they're important, they are great producers of wealth, but there's reasons that you want to regulate and control entities that are both amoral; their purpose is to maximize return to capital, which is a perfectly good thing to do, but they have no other obligation... [T]hey are immortal. Unless they mess up in the marketplace they go on forever, unlike you and I... Unless we have rules that govern their conduct, they can do enormous damage to our society; and we have had a massive effort to collect subsidies from the government, to get rid of government employees and replace them with private sector workers who typically cost twice as much. So the federal work force has gone down... but the number of people who are paid by the federal government to work is going up; and the cost per... labor-hour is going up enormously. ...Unlike creating a bureaucracy ...empire-building bureaucrats, now you have a corporation that makes campaign contributions to encourage more of this ...and more contracts and... money flowing their direction.
About David Cay Johnston
(born December 24, 1948) is an American investigative journalist and author specializing in economics and tax issues. He won the 2001 , and from 2009 to 2016 he was a Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at Syracuse University, Martin J. Whitman School of Management and College of Law, teaching tax, property, and regulatory law of the ancient world. From 2011 to 2012 he was a columnist for , writing, and producing video commentaries on worldwide issues of tax, accounting, economics, public finance and business. In recent years he has also written for and , and is the board president of , Inc. (IRE).
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Additional quotes by David Cay Johnston
Donald has a degree on his office [wall] from Penn, an ivy league school in economics <nowiki>[</nowiki>]. He was given that degree, and I emphasize the verb "given" because he always said "Mexico is going to pay for the wall." ...[A]ll thinking people went "How are you going to make a sovereign nation pay for a wall they don't want?" "I have a plan!" Do you know what his plan was when he came into office? "I'm going to put a tariff on Mexican goods." It's a guy with an economics degree who doesn't know that a tariff... means we pay for the wall through higher prices? The man doesn't know anything.
Trump has... been sued thousands of times for refusing to pay employees, vendors and others. Investors have sued him for fraud in a number of different cities. But among Trump’s most highly refined skills is his ability to deflect or shut down investigations. He also uses threats of litigation to deter news organizations from looking behind the curtains of the seemingly all-wise and all-powerful man they often refer to as The Donald.