Daily Inspiration Quote by Gary Becker

Becker’s line has the cool provocation of Chicago-school economics: it treats punishment not as moral theater but as a design problem. “Preferable” isn’t a plea for mercy; it’s a claim about system performance. A fine, in this framework, is elegantly dual-use: it hurts the offender and simultaneously funds the machinery that enforces the rules. The state stops paying to warehouse people and starts treating sanctions like pricing bad behavior.

The subtext is the economist’s signature move: translate messy human conflict into incentives, costs, and outputs. Imprisonment is wasteful in Becker’s ledger - expensive to administer, socially destructive, and economically unproductive. A fine is cleaner. It preserves labor, avoids some collateral damage, and makes deterrence scalable. The kicker - “punishment...also revenue” - is meant to sound like a win-win, a rare policy lever that doesn’t just burn money.

That’s also where the discomfort lives. Once punishment is revenue, the state acquires a financial interest in the act of punishing. Becker is implicitly betting that good institutional design can prevent perverse incentives, but he doesn’t argue it here. Read today, in an era of municipal budget crises and “fees and fines” policing, the line echoes less like efficiency and more like a warning label: when government can balance books by extracting pain, enforcement priorities can quietly drift from justice to yield.

Context matters: Becker helped build the “economic approach” to crime and punishment, where optimal penalties and probability of detection replace moral condemnation. The intent is clarity; the collateral is cynicism.