Wealth & Money Quote by Austin O'Malley

Austyn O'Malley turns prosperity into an insult, and he does it with the clean, weaponized symmetry of an epigram. The line pretends to defend God while actually putting both God and the wealthy on trial. If riches reliably landed in the hands of saints, then money might look like a moral scoreboard. Instead, O'Malley suggests, the distribution of wealth is so frequently mismatched with virtue that the only coherent theology is satire: God "shows his contempt" by awarding cash to people least worthy of it.

The barb works because it borrows the grammar of providence only to reverse its usual conclusion. "Selects" implies intention, even a hiring manager's discernment, but the selection criterion is perverse. The subtext is an attack on the era's easy pieties about success - the late 19th and early 20th century's industrial titans, inherited fortunes, and the popular impulse to treat economic winners as natural aristocrats. O'Malley collapses that story with one pivot: if wealth were evidence of merit, it wouldn't cluster around the vain, the venal, the lucky, and the well-connected.

Calling him a physicist adds an extra sting. He writes like someone accustomed to impersonal laws and measurable outcomes, then points at the obvious data set of social life: money does not behave like a moral force. The joke is that you can keep your faith, if you like, but you have to stop using wealth as proof of righteousness.