Aging & Wisdom Quote by Helen Clark

The line lands like a rebuke to the comforting myth that economies are self-cleaning ovens. Helen Clark isn’t just critiquing “the market” as an abstraction; she’s calling out the political alibi baked into market talk. “Left to sort matters out” is the giveaway phrase: it frames laissez-faire not as neutrality, but as a choice to step back while predictable harms step forward. The sentence turns passivity into culpability.

Her rhetorical move is deliberate escalation. It’s not “inequality might increase,” but “social injustice will be heightened,” “suffering... will grow.” That certainty matters. Clark is speaking in the register of governance, where outcomes aren’t philosophical debates but ledger lines in hospitals, schools, and housing queues. The market, in her telling, has no built-in mechanism for dignity; it optimizes for price signals, not human need. “Neglect the market fosters” is an especially sharp inversion: neglect isn’t merely what government does by withdrawing, it’s what markets actively produce when profits and public goods collide.

Contextually, Clark’s career sits inside the long hangover of 1980s-90s neoliberal reforms, especially acute in countries like New Zealand that ran hard experiments in privatization and deregulation. She’s articulating a center-left case for the state as moral infrastructure: not to micromanage commerce, but to prevent society from becoming a byproduct of it. The subtext is electoral and ethical at once: if you want fewer victims, you can’t outsource justice to an algorithm called “the market.”