Daily Inspiration Quote by Thorstein Veblen

Veblen doesn’t flatter the marketplace as a meritocracy; he guts it with a single, oily syllable: sabotage. The provocation works because it reverses the praise-word “sagacity” into something closer to a controlled demolition. If modern business folklore sells the entrepreneur as builder, Veblen insists the decisive advantage often comes from knowing what to stop, slow, or withhold.

The specific intent is diagnostic, not merely insulting. Writing in the era of giant trusts and consolidations, Veblen watched firms learn that profits don’t reliably follow from producing more or better goods. They follow from managing scarcity. “Judicious” is the tell: he’s not talking about chaotic vandalism, but strategic throttling - limiting output, maintaining prices, protecting patents, squeezing labor, cornering distribution, using legal and financial tools to prevent competitors or workers from expanding capacity. The executive’s genius, in this view, is less about inventing value than about policing the conditions under which value can be extracted.

Subtext: capitalism’s celebrated “efficiency” contains an internal contradiction. The industrial system can often produce abundantly, yet business success depends on not letting abundance break the spell of profitability. That’s why the line lands with cynical precision: it frames restraint as a core managerial competence, making the system’s rational actor look suspiciously like an arsonist with a fire code manual.

Context matters because Veblen is a theorist of status and power, not just prices. “Sabotage” is also cultural critique: the boardroom’s calm language of “discipline,” “rightsizing,” and “market stabilization” can be a velvet glove over coercion. He’s warning that the economy’s smartest moves may be, structurally, anti-social ones.