Student loans are destroying the imagination of youth. If there’s a way of a society committing mass suicide, what better way than to take all the youngest, most energetic, creative, joyous people in your society and saddle them with, like $50,000 of debt so they have to be slaves? There goes your music. There goes your culture. There goes everything new that would pop out. And in a way, this is what’s happened to our society. We’re a society that has lost any ability to incorporate the interesting, creative and eccentric people.

The notion that a society could be regulated entirely by market forces is a utopian fantasy: an impossible dream generated by imagining what the world would be like if everyone's behavior was utterly consistent with some abstract moral ideal-in this case, economic theories that assume all human action is based on calculating, systematic, (but scrupulously law-abiding), greed.

Free market ideology - does anyone know where it first comes from? It comes from medieval Islam, and specifically, Shari'a. Because Shari'a provided this commercial law that is independent from the state.

People don't have an ongoing relation unless it's a form of debt because everything is an exchange, so ongoing relationships are incomplete exchanges, and therefore one party is probably to blame - more likely than not, both are. Sociality itself seems to become like a matter of sin, and inherently wrong.

Aristotle [would] probably conclude most Americans, for all intents and purposes, are slaves.

I think we need to think of capitalism as a very bad way of organizing communism. Much of what we do is already communism, so just expand it.

Neoliberalism isn't an economic program - it's a political program designed to produce hopelessness and kill any future alternatives.