Politics & Power Quote by Arthur C. Brooks

Brooks’s line works like a two-step: first he claims technocratic authority ("the most efficient way of organizing an economy - which it is"), then he slides that claim into a moral identity statement ("an expression of American values"). The dash and the parenthetical are doing more than emphasis; they’re a power move. By treating efficiency as settled fact, he clears the runway to argue that disagreement isn’t merely about policy trade-offs but about belonging. If free enterprise equals American culture, then skepticism about markets starts to look less like a competing economic theory and more like cultural deviance.

That’s the intent: to reframe an economic debate as a cultural defense. It’s persuasive because it exploits a familiar American reflex, the tendency to treat the market not as an instrument but as a civic character test. In that framing, "fight" becomes the operative word. It’s not "vote", "reform", or "balance"; it’s combat language, positioning readers as participants in a larger struggle over national meaning.

The subtext is also strategic humility disguised as certainty. "In my book" sounds modest, even conversational, but it’s really a bid to set the terms of argument: efficiency (a quantitative claim) and values (a qualitative claim) fused into one mandate. Historically, this sits in a long lineage of post-Cold War, post-2008 rhetoric where capitalism is defended not only against regulation or redistribution but against the insinuation that markets corrode solidarity. Brooks counters by making markets the culture - and making culture the stakes.