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Surplus wealth is a sacred trust to be managed for the good of others.
Sep 10, 2025
When we were at peace, Democrats wanted to raise taxes. Now there's a war, so Democrats want to raise taxes. When there was a surplus, Democrats wanted to raise taxes. Now that there is a mild recession, Democrats want to raise taxes.
Just as the French of the nineteenth century invested their surplus capital in a railway-system in the belief that they would makemoney by it in this life, in the thirteenth they trusted their money to the Queen of Heaven because of their belief in her power to repay it with interest in the life to come.
If everyone would take only according to his needs and would leave the surplus to the needy, no one would be rich, no one poor, no one in misery.
There's always pain around. That's one thing you can guarantee in life - there will always be a surplus of pain.
Whether we like it or not, government intervention in the face of surplus is here to stay.
Not only must weapons be bought and paid for out of surpluses of capital and labour, but they must also be put to use. For this is the only means that capitalism has at its disposal to achieve the level of devaluation now required. The idea is dreadful in its implications. What better reason could there be to declare that it is time for capitalism to be gone, to give way to some saner mode of production?
Take it that you have died today, and your life's story is ended; and henceforward regard what future time may be given you as uncovenanted surplus, and live it out in harmony with nature.
The nature of business and government has been to build a surplus and self-perpetuate, but the Internet fosters and rewards smaller, more fluid organizations.
God is the source of my supply. His riches flow to me freely, copiously, and abundantly. All my financial and other needs are met at every moment of time and point of space; there is always a divine surplus.
Outlaw embryo farming, but allow using surplus embryos.
[The ruling elites] know who their enemies are, and their enemies are the people, the people at home and the people abroad. Their enemies are anybody who wants more social justice, anybody who wants to use the surplus value of society for social needs rather than for individual class greed, that's their enemy.
I went to the surplus store on Santa Monica and Vine (in Los Angeles) and went and got me a Navy outfit, put the black tape under my eyes. I got me a whistle and went in there with a hat looking like a full-on drill sergeant.
An industrious farmer occupies a more dignified place in the scale of beings...than a lazy lounger...too proud to work, and drawing out a miserable existence by eating on that surplus of other men's labor.
Business exists to supply goods and services to customers and economic surplus to society, rather than to supply jobs to workers and managers or even dividends to shareholders.
Some of the stainless steel discs that I play, I cut myself from pieces of stainless steel that I found. I don't make as many as I used to, because you can't get into surplus and scrap yards as easily anymore.
We establish a connection with the unknown through the act of giving something and, paradoxically, the act of destroying something. That is what is behind sacrifice. What you offer and what you destroy, it is that surplus which is life itself.
The earth is soaked and soggy with rain. Everything is drinking its fill and the surplus gluts the drains. The sky is full of it and lies low over the earth, heavy and dense. Even the sea is wetter than usual!
...if we expended all our energies solely on taking care of our own needs we would stop growing. In that respect what we call "soul" can be viewed as the surplus energy that can be invested into change and transformation. As such, it is the cutting edge of evolution.
Governments enjoying surpluses have a very strong temptation to splash money around, and while tax cuts are always appealing, cutting taxes at the top of a boom runs the real risk of creating a structural deficit when the boom subsides.
Tell her this And more,— That the king of the seas Weeps too, old, helpless man. The bustling fates Heap his hands with corpses Until he stands like a child With surplus of toys.
Producer's Surplus is a convenient name for the genus of which the rent of land is the leading species.
The surplus of society overrides all our traditions and shapes all our philosophies.
Man, who preys both on the vegetable and animal species, is himself a prey to neither. He too possesses the reproductive principle far beyond the degree requisite for the bare continuance of his species. What becomes of the surplus of human life to which this principle is competent?
Surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community.
Community is as endangered by surplus as it is by deficit. If there is too much money floating around it enables people to have no need of each other.
'Code sharing' is an economic surplus phenomenon. It works only when none of the people involved in it are in any form of need.
What becomes of the surplus of human life? It is either, 1st. destroyed by infanticide, as among the Chinese and Lacedemonians; or 2d. it is stifled or starved, as among other nations whose population is commensurate to its food; or 3d. it is consumed by wars and endemic diseases; or 4th. it overflows, by emigration, to places where a surplus of food is attainable.
Government can only do two things: It can beat people up and kill them. Or it can threaten to do so. When it seems to be doing something else - for example, handing out money or, say, surplus cheese - what's actually going on is that something has been taken away from one set of individuals by deadly force or the threat of deadly force, a hefty middleman's fee deducted, and whatever is left thrown to peasants delighted to receive stolen goods.
If they would rather die, . . . they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.
They fight so much for two reasons. One is they don't want to be blamed for breaking the spending caps. And secondly, they don't want to be blamed for spending the Social Security surplus on non-Social Security problems.
A canteen I remember vividly, and maybe one other thing, I can't remember. And I knew then that he had bought them in an army surplus store that day and he wanted to maybe enhance himself in my eyes, and say, "Well, yes, I have been in the army." Or [he] simply just didn't want to disappoint me. It could have been one or the other. But I knew that he had lied to me. And this filled me with a tremendous sort of anger towards him. At the same time, knowing he was trying to please me, so feeling good about him.
We had a $10 billion budget deficit when we got here in January of 2003. We cut that budget deficit; we did not raise taxes; we came back in '05, and we had an $8 billion surplus. That's how fast it can happen.
It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now Cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus.
Let us not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless when facing them." "Everything comes to us that belongs to us if we create the capacity to receive it." "Life is perpetually creative because it contains in itself that surplus which ever overflows the boundaries of the immediate time and space, restlessly pursuing its adventure of expression in the varied forms of self-realization." "The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.
Hannah Arendt in her study of totalitarianism borrowed from Immanuel Kant the concept of radical evil, of evil that's so evil that in the end it destroys itself, it's so committed to evil and it's so committed to hatred and cruelty that it becomes suicidal. My definition of it is the surplus value that's generated by totalitarianism. It means you do more violence, more cruelty than you absolutely have to to stay in power.
I want to reform the tax code so that it's simple, fair, and asks the wealthiest households to pay higher taxes on incomes over $250,000 - the same rate we had when Bill Clinton was president; the same rate we had when our economy created nearly 23 million new jobs, the biggest surplus in history, and a lot of millionaires to boot.
He [Steve Jobs] had come from the surplus electronics parts world.So he came from that world, and he said let's sell PC boards for $40. We'll build them for $20 and sell them for $40.
In New Mexico, I inherited the largest structural deficit in state history, and our legislature is controlled by Democrats. We don't always agree, but we came together in a bipartisan manner and turned that deficit into a surplus. And we did it without raising taxes.
The problem is capitalism. The problem is that in order to sell seven billion people on the necessity of globalisation, we've created a moral universe where people who do not work to create profit are considered less than human, and used as surplus labour to drive down the cost of wages.
Fashion is the most intense expression of the phenomenon of neomania, which has grown ever since the birth of capitalism. Neomania assumes that purchasing the new is the same as acquiring value... If the purchase of a new garment coincides with the wearing out of an old one, then obviously there is no fashion. If a garment is worn beyond the moment of its natural replacement, there is pauperization. Fashion flourishes on surplus, when someone buys more than he or she needs.
Soaring prices for crude oil, falling production surpluses, wild speculation in commodities, a rush into the precious metals, turmoil in the Middle East, assertive oil producers: it is 1973-74 all over again, and at dictation speed.
Cooperation is in fact the living and productive pulsation of the multitudo. Cooperation is the articulation in which an infinite number of the singularities are composed as productive essence of the new. Cooperation is innovation, richness, and thus the basis of the creative surplus that defines the expression of the multitudo.
A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.
The alarm must be sounded because it is the economic and social system of capitalism and imperialism that prevents the urgently needed full mobilization of the potential economic surplus and the attainment of rates of economic advancement that can be secured with its help.
In order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets. [...] The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question.
President Clinton was able to achieve budget surpluses despite a divided government.
By requiring that any surplus in Social Security taxes be returned to the American people in personal savings accounts, the plan ensures that Social Security taxes will be used for Social Security.
It strikes me as being morally repulsive and intellectually absurd that people die of want in a world of surplus.
Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.