The policies of the eighties and nineties…were based, John Gray argued in his book False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (1998), on ‘the theory that market freedoms are natural and political restraints on markets are artifical. The truth is that free markets are creatures of state power, and persist only so long as the state is able to prevent human needs for security and the control of economic risk from finding political expression.’
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Just as the late twentieth century grasped the fact that there was a crisis of environmental sustainability, the twenty-first century is beginning to grasp the dimensions of a comparable crisis, this time of human sustainability – a scarcity of the conditions which nurture resilient, secure individuals, familities, friendships and communities.
Madeleine Bunting. Willing Slaves: How the overwork culture is ruling our lives (2004). p. xx-xxi
One reply on “human sustainability”
“The truth is that free markets are creatures of state power, and persist only so long as the state is able to prevent human needs for security and the control of economic risk from finding political expression.”
Someone who manages to contradict himself (or herself, as it happens) twice in one sentence does not really deserve to be quoted, if you ask me. Except if you’re uncharitable of course.