“The only way democratic, capitalist societies have ever been able to lift the bottom is by investing in capacity for the bottom and the places where you get that money is from the very tippy-top because, right now, that’s where it all is.

We don’t live in a volunteer society. We live in a society that requires all of us to pull together. Try using that [radical individualist] attitude at the next company meeting. I’ve run a lot of companies and once in a while somebody will pop-up with this attitude. You know what we do with those people? We fire them; Both because they’re useless and they’re poisonous to the culture. The simple fact is that important things don’t get done on a volunteer basis.

It’s ridiculous and it’s fundamentally flawed. If it was true that less taxes and less regulation and less government would create prosperity, then some place on Earth there would be this Libertarian Utopia where nobody paid any taxes, nobody followed any rules and everybody lived like a king. Prosperity [has always been] linked to our investment in society. That’s why, of the 195 countries on Earth, the only prosperous ones, are ones that are high taxed, high regulation and high government. And anywhere you find somebody employing limited government, it’s a hell-hole.

The Regan legacy was a legacy of deficits. Regan was a Keynesian, he invented deficit spending. 1980 is not 2010. The simple facts are that the middle class has been eviscerated to the point where you can’t give them a tax break big enough to generate the kind of demand you need to get this economy going. If middle class Americans retained the same share of income today as they did in 1980, the average American would have $15,000 more per year to spend. The problem is that we have structured an economy and a society that asymmetrically benefits people like me. It’s not fair and it’s horrible for business. That’s my fundamental point. I am not a liberal do-gooder.”

—Nick Hanauer, mega-rich venture capitalist

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