Politics & Power Quote by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Buckley’s line is a neat piece of ideological aikido: he takes the standard moral pitch for collectivism and flips it so fast you feel the torque. The sentence runs on a simple hinge word - “because” - repeated twice to suggest that the justification for expanded state control is endlessly self-renewing. Poverty? Collectivize. Prosperity? Still collectivize. The joke isn’t just that the rationale changes; it’s that the conclusion never does. Buckley wants you to hear a machine that always outputs the same policy, no matter what you feed into it.

The intent is less to refute any single social program than to delegitimize the argumentative style behind them: an elastic moral logic that can’t be falsified. That’s classic Buckley, who made a career of treating political language as a kind of con game - not necessarily malicious, but structurally rigged. The subtext is suspicion of experts and planners who frame every circumstance as evidence for more centralized authority. If politics can claim emergency status in both scarcity and abundance, then “collectivize” stops being a response and becomes a reflex.

Context matters: Buckley is writing out of the mid-century conservative project, shaped by memories of the New Deal, the allure and horror of Soviet central planning, and later the Great Society’s confidence in technocratic management. The line also carries a patrician sting: it implies that prosperity is being used as a pretext for redistribution not to solve need but to satisfy a moralized envy or a managerial appetite. Its power comes from reducing a sprawling policy debate to a single pattern of rhetorical opportunism - and daring you to unsee it.