Daily Inspiration Quote by Douglas Horton

Horton’s joke lands because it smuggles a moral sermon into the language of freshman economics, then punctures it with grease-stained specificity. “Our desires are insatiable” is the cool, bloodless premise of scarcity: wants expand, resources don’t, so choices hurt. Then he yanks the abstraction down to the body: three Big Macs, max. The pivot is the point. Human longing may be bottomless, but human appetite is stubbornly finite. Economics can model preference curves all it wants; the stomach still gets the final veto.

The Big Mac isn’t just any example. It’s mass-produced indulgence, postwar abundance, the democratization of “treat yourself” into a paper-wrapped routine. Horton frames consumer desire as almost theological, a restless hunger that modern markets are delighted to cultivate. Yet the punchline implies a built-in limit that markets can’t erase: saturation, nausea, consequence. The humor is pastoral in its own way: a reminder that we’re not pure desire-machines but embodied creatures with thresholds, digestion, and shame.

As a clergyman, Horton is also quietly needling the pretensions of economic rationality. If the “first rule” sounds like a law of nature, the “second rule” reveals how contingent these laws are on flesh-and-blood constraints. The subtext is an ethical one: chasing infinite wanting through finite bodies is a recipe for spiritual and social indigestion. He’s not rejecting economics; he’s reminding it that humans don’t live on demand curves alone.