Wealth & Money Quote by Bertolt Brecht

Brecht lands the punchline like a stage trapdoor: the real bandits wear suits, file paperwork, and get applauded for “innovation.” “Easier” is doing a lot of work here. He’s not just talking about convenience; he’s pointing to legitimacy as a labor-saving device. Once theft is laundered through institutions, it stops looking like violence and starts looking like policy, risk management, or just “how the world works.”

The line’s brilliance is its reversal of moral theater. A lone stickup man is instantly legible as criminal because he disrupts the social script. A bank, by contrast, is built to normalize extraction: interest, foreclosures, fees, and speculative games that privatize gains and socialize losses. Brecht’s subtext is that capitalism doesn’t merely tolerate exploitation; it aestheticizes it, gives it architecture, logos, and legal language. The system doesn’t have to hide its coercion because it has convinced us coercion is consent.

Context matters. Brecht wrote in the churn between world wars, when German society saw hyperinflation, mass unemployment, and the rising power of industrial and financial elites alongside political extremism. His Marxist lens and epic theater aimed to estrange the audience from the “naturalness” of bourgeois life, making the familiar suddenly suspicious. This aphorism functions like one of his theatrical interrupts: a compact jolt that turns a personal morality tale (don’t rob) into a structural one (who gets to define robbery).

It’s cynicism with an agenda: not despair, but clarity. Brecht wants you to notice that the cleanest crimes come with a stamped approval.