“Colonel Cargill was so awful a marketing executive that his services were much sought after by firms eager to establish losses for tax purposes.”

“Buttercup's mother whirled on him. 'Did you forget to pay your taxes?' (This was after taxes. But everything is after taxes. Taxes were here even before stew.)”

“In the United States I saw how the market liberates the individual and allows people to be free to make personal choices. But the biggest drawback was that the market always pushes things to the side of the powerful. I thought the poor should be able to take advantage of the system in order to improve their lot.Grameen is a private-sector self-help bank, and as its members gain personal wealth they acquire water-pumps, latrines, housing, education, access to health care, and so on. Another way to achieve this is to let abusiness earn profit that is then txed by the government, and the tax can be used to provide services to the poor. But in practice it never works that way. In real life, taxes only pay for a government bureaucracy that collects the tax and provides little or nothing to the poor. And since most government bureaucracies are not profit motivated, they have little incentive to increase their efficiency. In fact, they have a disincentive: governments often cannot cut social services without a public outcry, so the behemoth continues, blind and inefficient, year after year.”

“That effort to undermine competitive markets is no better in the market for labor than it is for goods and services.”

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”

“But money spent while manic doesn't fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you're given excellent reason to be even more so.”