Politics & Power Quote by Tom Scholz

It lands like a backstage aside that’s half confession, half indictment: the ugliest thought you try not to have, then catch yourself believing anyway. Coming from Tom Scholz - a musician who also moved through the machinery of engineering and mass production - the line reads less like abstract anti-capitalism and more like a firsthand report from inside the factory of American ambition.

The rhetorical move is the grim escalation. Plenty of people accept that corporations treat animals as inventory; Scholz tightens the screw by suggesting human life can slip into the same ledger logic. “Sometimes I actually start to think” is doing key work: it’s a hedge that signals reluctance, not uncertainty. He’s not performing outrage; he’s narrating a creeping realization, which makes the accusation feel earned rather than posed.

The real target isn’t “corporate America” as a cartoon villain, but the incentive structure that turns moral limits into line items. “So long as there are big profits to be made” is the subtextual thesis: if profit is the only non-negotiable, everything else becomes negotiable - safety, health, dignity, even death. It’s an argument about systems, not individual bad actors.

Culturally, this sits in the long post-70s rock tradition of mistrusting institutions, but it’s pointed in a way that anticipates modern skepticism about pharma pricing, workplace fatalities, environmental racism, and algorithmic “externalities.” Scholz isn’t asking for sympathy; he’s asking why we’re surprised when a balance sheet behaves like a balance sheet.