Science Quote by Howard Scott

A neat piece of technocratic acid: Scott flips the moral script by treating “criminal” as a class label, not an ethical one. The line’s sting comes from its deadpan substitution of finance for virtue. Predation doesn’t disappear when it puts on a suit; it just becomes legible as “enterprise.” By making “sufficient capital” the deciding factor, Scott implies the boundary between crime and respectable commerce is less about harm than about institutional permission.

The subtext is a takedown of legitimacy as a purchased outcome. If you’re poor, your predatory instincts are prosecuted. If you’re rich, they’re professionalized, buffered by lawyers, lobbying, and the cultural prestige of “job creation.” Scott’s joke isn’t that corporations are literally criminal gangs; it’s sharper than that. He’s saying capitalism can function as a laundering machine for antisocial behavior, converting exploitation into a balance sheet entry and violence into externalities.

Context matters: Scott, a founder of Technocracy Inc., came of age in the age of trusts, monopoly power, and the aftershocks of the Great Depression, when ordinary people watched financiers and industrialists wreck lives while often escaping personal accountability. His worldview was skeptical of profit as a guiding principle and eager to replace politics-as-usual with “scientific” administration.

The quote works because it weaponizes a single, modern anxiety: that our institutions don’t restrain predation; they scale it. It’s not just cynical. It’s a warning about how easily power rewrites the dictionary.