Foreign aid has been perfected so that it subsidizes corporate U.S. agriculture while preventing poor countries from developing profitable agriculture or feeding themselves.
Nicholas von HoffmanAmericans will quarrel over how, who, or what to rescue or save, but the idea that the nation ought to be off doing it is challenged only by a few.
Nicholas von HoffmanThe blame for the maddening complications of the federal tax system goes to the people with the most money
Nicholas von HoffmanWe preach free enterprise capitalism. We believe in it, we give our lives in war for it, but the closest most of us come to profiting from it are a few miserable shares of stock in a company that doesn't pay large enough dividends to keep a small mouse in cheese. The truth is, most of us are job serfs. At a time when invested capital returns 20 to 30 percent, we have no capital. We only have our wages and salaries, and a debt so high that something like 20c on every dollar we earn is spent to pay off what we owe.
Nicholas von HoffmanIn one of his puckish moods Saul talked the president of a university into letting him anonymously take an examination being administered to candidates for a doctorate in community organization. "Three of the questions were on the philosophy of and motivations of Saul Alinsky," writes Saul. "I answered two of them incorrectly."
Nicholas von HoffmanKelso's proposals do promise to free us from our morbid dependency on economic health through armament manufacture; they promise a way out of the welfare mess, out of foodstamps and ship subsidies, out of perpetual inflation, and they suggest a means of doing these things without being too disruptive of the wealth of five percent of the population who own the rest of us.
Nicholas von Hoffman