Wealth & Money Quote by Garet Garrett

Capital formation, Garrett insists, isn’t born in boardrooms; it starts in the small, almost comic act of resisting yourself. The ten-dollar bill under the rug is intentionally homely economics, a rebuttal to the idea that prosperity is powered mainly by spending. He picks a deliberately unglamorous hiding place to make the point feel pre-institutional, even pre-political: before there are banks, bonds, or factories, there’s a person choosing not to consume.

The intent is polemical. Garrett, a prominent critic of the New Deal’s expanding state, is smuggling a moral argument inside a mechanical one: saving is not just a financial operation but a virtue, a decision to defer gratification in the name of future production. The subtext is a warning about policy regimes that treat consumption as the engine and thrift as a drag. If you can persuade the public that “unused” money is waste, you make room for constant stimulus, easy credit, and government management as permanent habits rather than emergency measures.

The phrase “ten dollars’ worth of something” does more work than it seems. It translates cash into real goods you chose not to buy, emphasizing scarcity and trade-offs. That concreteness is the rhetorical trick: it turns an abstract macroeconomic debate into a household scene, where the costs of “spend now” ideology feel immediate. Garrett’s worldview is clear: growth starts with restraint, and any system that mocks restraint is quietly eating its seed corn.