“The author points to the impact of what he called Dutch disease, where the discovery of found wealth from a particular commodity causes a culture to atrophy with respect to work ethic and broader development. Continuing wealth from the single commodity is taken for granted. The government, flush with wealth, is expected to be generous. When the price of that commodity drops, a government which would remain in power dare not cut back on this generosity.”

“Power and money in evil hands have caused all the miseries of the world so far. Both have devastated poorer countries in particular. There must be checks in the exercise of political and military power, and a ceiling on wealth (of all varieties). Governance in a situation of unequal hold on power and wealth is a sham. The pundits who write and lecture so much on governance should do well to learn this basic concept. ”

“Such a crises occurs only where the ever-lengthening chain of payments,and an artificial system of settling them, has been fullydeveloped. Whenever there is a general and extensive disturbanceof this mechanism, no matter what its cause, money becomessuddenly and immediately transformed from its merely ideal shapeof money of account into hard cash. Profane commodities can nolonger replace it. The use-value of commodities becomesvalueless, and their value vanishes in the presence of its ownindependent form. On the eve of the crisis, the bourgeois, withthe self-sufficiency that springs from intoxicating prosperity,declares money to be a vain imagination. Commodities alone aremoney. But now the cry is everywhere that money alone is acommodity! As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soulafter money, the only wealth.”

“Nothing is generous. New knowledge is a valuable commodity. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we are.”

“Every given commodity fights for itself, cannot acknowledge the others, and attempts to impose itself everywhere as if it were the only one. The spectacle, then is the epic poem of this struggle, an epic which cannot be concluded by the fall of any Troy. The spectacle does not sign the praises of men and their weapons, but of commodities and their passions. In this blind struggle every commodity, pursuing its passion, unconsciously realizes something higher: the becoming-world of the commodity, which is also the becoming-commodity of the world. Thus, by means of a ruse of commodity logic, what's specific in the commodity wears itself out in the fight while the commodity-form moves toward its absolute realization.”

“Wealth is power, and power is the only thing about which contemporary culture cares.”