Politics & Power Quote by Russell Baker

Baker’s line lands like a casual shrug that turns, mid-sentence, into an indictment. He borrows the authority of a “law” not to sound scientific, but to mock how predictably America treats the non-monetized parts of life: as suspicious, indulgent, or downright wasteful. The phrase “anywhere except in the wallet” is doing the heavy lifting. It’s funny because it’s blunt, but it’s also bleak: the wallet becomes the only body part the culture admits can feel enrichment.

The subtext is less about personal greed than about an ideology that dresses itself up as common sense. By calling everything else “uneconomic,” Baker points to the rhetorical trick that turns choices into inevitabilities. Public libraries, arts programs, long lunches, humane work schedules, even unprofitable kinds of care: these aren’t debated on their merits; they’re disqualified by a single word that pretends to be neutral. “Uneconomic” sounds technical, like a spreadsheet verdict, which is exactly the point. It’s morality with the label rubbed off.

Context matters because Baker wrote from inside the ecosystem he’s skewering: mainstream American journalism in the postwar era, when “efficiency,” “growth,” and “the taxpayer” became the language of adult seriousness. His joke exposes how economic talk colonizes everything, narrowing the definition of value until it fits inside a quarterly report. The sting is that he’s not arguing the wallet doesn’t matter. He’s arguing that we’ve made it the only place we’re allowed to count.