Leadership Quote by Barry Goldwater

A line like this lands with the thud of a campaign cudgel: the problem isn’t competition, regulation, or wages, Goldwater implies, it’s attitude. “Forgotten” is doing the moral work here. Businesses aren’t merely failing at a tactic; they’ve lapsed into negligence, gotten lazy on the fundamentals, and now deserve the consequences. Goldwater’s genius was to turn managerial competence into an ideological virtue. “Selling” isn’t just moving product - it’s the American faith that persuasion, hustle, and individual initiative are the real engines of prosperity.

The subtext is a conservative rebuke aimed as much at boardrooms as at Washington. If business has stopped “selling,” it’s because it’s been seduced by something softer: dependence on government contracts, protective policies, cost-plus arrangements, and the cozy postwar consensus that treated big firms as quasi-public institutions. Goldwater’s politics thrived on attacking that consensus. He frames market success as a matter of personal responsibility, then uses that frame to argue against the safety nets - corporate or federal - that dampen risk.

Context matters: mid-century America saw the rise of mass marketing, suburban consumer culture, and giant corporations that could feel insulated from the street-level pressure of needing customers. Goldwater’s sentence needles that complacency. It flatters the small-business ethos while warning large companies that public sympathy is not guaranteed. If you want legitimacy in America, he suggests, earn it the old-fashioned way: convince people, don’t manage them.