Wealth & Money Quote by Sydney J. Harris

A neat little reversal does most of the work here: Harris starts with a literal crime and pivots to a moral one. “Men make counterfeit money” is the obvious headline, the kind of wrongdoing a society can quantify, police, and punish. Then comes the sharper accusation: “in many more cases, money makes counterfeit men.” The line implies that cash doesn’t just tempt people into forgery; it forges them. It manufactures imitation humans who look functional in public but are hollowed out by appetite, status anxiety, and the need to perform success.

Harris was a midcentury newspaper columnist, writing in an America where prosperity became ideology: suburban comfort, corporate ladders, the shiny promise that consumption equals character. In that environment, “counterfeit” isn’t about fake bills so much as fake selves. The phrasing borrows the authority of economics - counterfeit is a technical term - and smuggles in an ethical verdict. He’s calling out a culture that treats value as something stamped on you from the outside: salary, brand, address, résumé. If those are the metrics, then a person can be “valid” without being real.

The subtext is uncomfortably democratic: this isn’t only about a few villains printing bogus notes. It’s about ordinary people quietly altering their souls to pass inspection. Money, in Harris’s formulation, is less a tool than a mold - and the tragedy is that it produces convincing replicas. The punch lands because the sentence itself behaves like a counterfeit operation: a small switch, a perfect-looking copy, and suddenly the whole system of value feels suspect.