Daily Inspiration Quote by Thorstein Veblen

Veblen needles capitalism by mimicking its own pieties and then letting them curdle. Read straight, the line sounds like a hard-nosed maxim from a boardroom: take the profit, ignore the squeamishness. Read as Veblen intended, it is a diagnosis of a system that confuses private gain with public good, then calls the confusion "sound business" so it can sleep at night.

The trick is the phrasing. "Always" turns a situational tactic into a moral absolute. "Obtainable" shrinks ambition into opportunism: the goal is not building something durable, but harvesting whatever can be extracted now. "Net gain" frames the world as a spreadsheet where benefits are cleanly separable from harms, as if losses borne by workers, neighbors, or ecosystems simply fall outside the ledger. Then comes the punchline: "at any cost and at any risk to the rest of the community". Veblen states the quiet part loudly, exposing the hidden premise that the community is an externality - scenery, not stakeholder.

Context matters. Writing in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Veblen watched industrial consolidation, speculative finance, labor conflict, and conspicuous consumption harden into a culture that treated predation as efficiency. His broader project was to show that "business" is not synonymous with "industry": making money and making useful things can diverge, sometimes violently. The line works because it performs the ideology it condemns, letting readers feel how easily profit-talk slides into permission - and how thin the veneer of civic responsibility can be when quarterly returns are on the line.