“Prevailing in Washington as on Wall Street were the most vile and self destructive assumptions of anti-capitalists everywhere who imagined they could wield capital even while abandoning the principles that created it; that systems could substitute for the moral standards they once embodied; or that men who lost trillions of dollars of other people’s money might somehow recover it if only the government would give them trillions more. Crony capitalists on the right and socialists on the left united as always behind their most fundamental belief, that wealth is to be captured by power and pull rather than created in the minds of men.

from Panic – The Betrayal of Capitalism by Wall Street and Washington by Andrew Redleaf and Richard Vigilante

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