Wealth & Money Quote by Dennis Prager

Prager’s line isn’t a diagnosis so much as a framing weapon: it casts conservatives as moral realists and liberals as material reductionists. The syntax does the work. “Good and evil” reads like timeless, almost biblical seriousness; “rich and poor” sounds like accounting. One side gets to be the guardian of virtue, the other gets pegged as resentful or obsessed with class. It’s a neat piece of asymmetric branding.

The subtext is a challenge to liberal legitimacy. If politics is about “good and evil,” then compromise looks like complicity and policy arguments become tests of character. If politics is about “rich and poor,” then moral questions can be dismissed as cover stories for power and money. Prager is betting that many listeners prefer to see themselves as principled rather than interested; he offers conservatives a flattering self-image while implying liberals can’t recognize moral agency, only economic incentive.

Context matters: this is a staple of late-20th- and 21st-century American talk-media combat, where the goal is less to describe opponents than to pre-load an audience’s emotional response to them. It also smuggles in a theory of what motivates people. Conservatives, in this telling, are moved by values; liberals are moved by envy or redistributionist impulse. That’s rhetorically potent because it doesn’t just disagree with liberal policies - it questions the moral seriousness of the people advocating them.

The irony is that both worldviews traffic in both axes all the time. Conservatives routinely talk about elites, taxes, and “makers vs. takers.” Liberals make moral claims constantly - about rights, cruelty, dignity. The line works because it’s not fair; it’s memorable.