"It is almost enough to make one's jaw drop to think that officials at the World Bank and the IMF would suggest that they have poverty alleviation in mind when they force governments to withdraw subsidies that enable poor people to get clean water to drink. If this is a policy aimed at helping the world's poor, it's interesting to imagine what a policy aimed at hurting the world's poor would look like."

“s things now stand, the case that capitalism will make the world - not just the West - materially better off has simply not been convincingly demonstrated. Indeed, with almost 70 per cent of the world's people experiencing a decline in their real incomes in recent years, the opposite appears to be true. The wanton celebration of market capitalism while so many people throughout the world are lacking basic food and shelter seems, if not downright vulgar, at least a little insensitive.”

“Thomas Friedman dismissed the protesters in Quebec City as members of the "Coalition to Keep Poor People Poor." …The Coalition to Keep Poor People Poor might as well disband; its apparent goal is being accomplished in spades by pro-market forces. If the prospects of the world's poor improving their lot is one that supposedly upsets anti-capitalist protestors, they can confidently put their gas masks and get back to the shopping mall - global capitalism can be trusted to keep the poor in check without any help.”

“Canada got one break in the Walkerton tragedy: the deadly contamination of the Ontario town's water supply, which killed seven people in the summer of 2000, came from cow manure. If the contamination had come instead from, say, a toxic chemical produced by a foreign company, that would have been worse. Then the company might well have sued Canada for hundreds of millions of dollars.”

“Under the market system, there is demand for a product if a lot of people want it - but that demand counts for nothing if those people have no money. If they lack money, their demand essentially doesn't exist...This explains why the drug industry is not investing money to develop a cure for a disease known as sleeping sickness, which leaves its victims in a coma. The disease...killed 66,000 people last year and threatens to infect 60 million more - but the only people who are afflicted by it are poverty-stricken Africans with no clout in the marketplace. Interestingly, there is a drug called eflornithine that is effective in lifting victims out of their comas. But drug companies stopped producing eflornithine in 1995 because it was no longer profitable to continue. The drug was still desperately needed, but only by people without money. So, following modern market practices, these people were simply left in a coma.”

“Utterly left out of Tax Freedom Day is any notion that taxes are what we pay to buy services that we all need and use, and that would be much more expensive or even impossible to purchase privately - fire and police protection, highways, roads, canals, coast guard services, snow removal, water purification, schools, hospitals, libraries, etc. Tax Freedom Day could undoubtably be moved up to early January if we were prepared to walk out of our dwellings that morning onto a dirt path and take our chances on what might befall us.”

“Those tempted to slough off the helpful role of the state should... "compare the fortune accumulated by Cornelius Vanderbilt in America with what he might have accumulated had he been adopted when an infant by a family of Hottentots.”