Politics & Power Quote by Charles Edison

Strip away the spreadsheets and you still land on the messy truth Edison is pointing at: money, power, and ego don’t merely overlap, they co-produce each other. Coming from a businessman (and the son of Thomas Edison), the line reads less like a classroom aphorism and more like a field report from boardrooms where “policy” is often a person’s preference wearing a tie.

The intent is pragmatic. Edison isn’t moralizing about corruption so much as warning against naive compartmentalization: you can’t model an economy without accounting for who’s making the decisions, what they need politically, and which personal rivalries are quietly steering the wheel. The subtext is about leverage. If economics and politics are inseparable, then budgets become ballots, regulation becomes strategy, and “principle” can be a brand asset. Personalities matter because institutions are staffed by people with ambitions, grudges, vanity, and loyalties that don’t fit neatly into rational-choice charts.

Context sharpens the point. Edison’s lifetime spans the rise of corporate America, the New Deal’s expansion of government, wartime mobilization, and the postwar administrative state - decades when business and government learned to speak each other’s language fluently. In that world, the clean separation between “the market” and “the state” is mostly rhetorical theater. Edison’s line works because it punctures that theater without sounding scandalized: it’s a reminder that the real unit of analysis isn’t just capital or policy, but the human beings who trade in both.