Wealth & Money Quote by Jonathan Swift

Eminence, Swift suggests, is never free; it’s a revenue stream for everyone who didn’t get there first. “Censure” arrives as a kind of civic duty, the invoice society sends when a person rises high enough to be seen. Calling it a “tax” is the wickedly efficient move: taxes are impersonal, routine, almost moralized. You don’t argue with them; you budget for them. Swift folds public resentment into the machinery of governance, implying that criticism isn’t merely occasional backlash but a predictable levy exacted by the crowd.

The line also needles the idea of “the public” as a benevolent judge. Swift treats it like a collective bureaucracy: faceless, entitled, and strangely comforted by taking its cut. The subtext is less “ignore your haters” than “understand the transaction.” Eminence buys influence, visibility, and authority; the payment is scrutiny, envy, and the pleasure others take in trimming you back to size. The public polices status because status threatens the fiction that everyone is roughly equal.

Context matters: Swift wrote in an age of pamphlet wars, partisan press, and public moral campaigns, and he spent his career being both celebrated and attacked. A satirist’s fame is especially taxable because satire itself is a provocation; it creates enemies as efficiently as it creates admirers. There’s a cold comfort here: censure becomes proof of significance. If you’re being audited, you’re in the system.