Eli Sunday:
Oh, Daniel, please... I'm in desperate times. I need a friend... I feel the walls closing in. I've sinned! I need help! I'm a sinner! I've let the Devil grab hold of me in ways I never imagined! I'm so full of sin.
Plainview:
The Lord sometimes challenges us, doesn't he?
Eli Sunday:
Oh yes he does! Yes he does! Oh! He's completely failed to alert me to the recent panic in our economy and this! I must have this! I've invested... my investments have... Oh, Daniel, I won't bore you, but I... If I could grab the Lord's hands for help I would, but he does these things all the time, these mysteries that he presents and while we wait, while we wait... wait for his word...
Plainview:
You're not the chosen brother, Eli. It was Paul who was chosen. He found me and he told me about your land. You're a fraud.
Eli Sunday:
Why are you talking about Paul? Don't say this... don't say this to me, Daniel.
Plainview:
I did what your brother couldn't. I broke you and I beat you.
Lucy Hill:
[conversation at dinner table] Industrial competition in a free-market economy is what built this country.
Ted Mitchell:
No, robber barons built this country, and they did it from the blood of working folks. Hell, you steal somebody's car, you get thrown in jail, you steal somebody's life savings, you get to be a CEO.
Lucy Hill:
I'm planning on being a CEO.
Ted Mitchell:
Well, Blanche, you better count the silverware before she leaves, then.
Lucy Hill:
Oh, don't bother, I'm leaving now.
Ted Mitchell:
Not if I leave first. [both get up to leave together]
In a society in which nearly everybody is dominated by somebody else's mind or by a disembodied mind, it becomes increasingly difficult to learn the truth about the activities of governments and corporations, about the quality or value of products, or about the health of one's own place and economy.
In such a society, also, our private economies will depend less and less upon the private ownership of real, usable property, and more and more upon property that is institutional and abstract, beyond individual control, such as money, insurance policies, certificates of deposit, stocks, and shares. And as our private economies become more abstract, the mutual, free helps and pleasures of family and community life will be supplanted by a kind of displaced or placeless citizenship and by commerce with impersonal and self-interested suppliers...
Thus, although we are not slaves in name, and cannot be carried to market and sold as somebody else's legal chattels, we are free only within narrow limits. For all our talk about liberation and personal autonomy, there are few choices that we are free to make. What would be the point, for example, if a majority of our people decided to be self-employed?
The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.
(pg. 57-58,
