Wealth & Money Quote by Thomas Dewey

A line like this flatters the American myth that government should be a temporary detour for the competent, not a career for the dependent. Dewey, the famously efficient New York governor who built his brand on clean, businesslike administration, is selling a particular moral math: if you can prosper in the market, you’re less likely to use public office to prosper off it. The sentence is a prophylactic against corruption, packaged as common sense.

The subtext is sharper. It treats private earning power as a proxy for virtue: competence, independence, even character. That’s rhetorically clever because it borrows legitimacy from capitalism without arguing for capitalism. It also smuggles in a quiet suspicion of “professional politicians,” the idea that anyone who needs the job will cling to it, flatter donors, and treat the state as a personal life raft.

Context matters: mid-century Republicanism often pitched itself as managerial, anti-machine, anti-New Deal bloat. Dewey’s quip lands as a rebuke to patronage culture and to the fear that expanding government creates a self-interested governing class.

But the line also reveals its blind spot: it assumes the private sector’s rewards track public-service competence. The people who can “make more money” privately are often those already endowed with networks, credentials, and insulation from everyday precarity. As an ethic, it can read less like anti-corruption and more like a gatekeeping theory of democracy: the best stewards are the ones who don’t need the paycheck. The wit is that it sounds like humility; the politics is that it quietly narrows who counts as fit to serve.