Politics & Power Quote by Herbert Hoover

A tidy line with a deceptively sharp edge, Hoover's warning tries to draw a two-way quarantine around power. The obvious half is familiar American rhetoric: keep the state from meddling in markets. The more revealing half flips the sentence and makes it harder to cheer unthinkingly: keep business from capturing the state. Hoover is not romanticizing laissez-faire so much as defending a boundary that protects legitimacy on both sides.

The intent is double-pronged. He is arguing that government loses public trust when it acts like a boardroom, and business loses its dynamism when it acts like a ministry. The subtext is a fear of collusion: tariffs written by the industries they protect, regulators groomed by the firms they police, public policy becoming a private subsidy. Hoover's symmetry is the point. By balancing the sentence, he signals that corruption is not only a governmental vice; it is a market strategy.

Context matters: Hoover's career bridged Progressive-era faith in expert administration and the crisis politics of the Great Depression. As commerce secretary he helped standardize and coordinate industries, and as president he resisted direct federal relief even as he supported measures that stabilized banks and encouraged cooperation. This line reads like an attempt to reclaim a principled middle ground after the era's messy improvisations: yes to rules that keep the game fair, no to a revolving door that rigs it.

Rhetorically, the sentence works because it refuses a partisan comfort. It casts "government" and "business" as equal temptations, forcing the listener to admit that the real threat is concentrated power, whichever letterhead it wears.