"Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea, God Bless, keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and paid forward for the next kid who comes along"
About this Quote
Warren frames wealth not as a private miracle but as a public collaboration with receipts. The opening, "Now look", is a disarming conversational move: she grants the entrepreneur their win before she narrows the argument to its real target - the myth of the self-made factory. By saying "God Bless" and "keep a big hunk of it", she borrows the language of praise and property to preempt the knee-jerk accusation that she hates success. The point is not to scold ambition; it's to redefine what ambition owes.
The phrase "underlying social contract" is doing heavy work. It's legalistic enough to sound serious, moral enough to sound fair, and vague enough to invite listeners to supply their own version of obligation. Warren's subtext is that markets are not natural phenomena; they are curated ecosystems. Roads, courts, educated workers, stable currency, enforceable patents - all the unglamorous infrastructure that makes a "terrific" factory possible - are the invisible partners in every origin story.
"Take a hunk" is deliberately un-ivy: plainspoken, almost folksy. It translates redistribution into something tactile, commonsense, even neighborly. And "paid forward for the next kid" shifts the frame from punishment to continuity. Taxes become a relay baton, not a confiscation. In context, this is a rebuttal to austerity-era rhetoric that treated government as a drag on growth. Warren flips it: public investment is the condition of growth, and the moral test of winners is whether they fund the on-ramp for whoever's next.
The phrase "underlying social contract" is doing heavy work. It's legalistic enough to sound serious, moral enough to sound fair, and vague enough to invite listeners to supply their own version of obligation. Warren's subtext is that markets are not natural phenomena; they are curated ecosystems. Roads, courts, educated workers, stable currency, enforceable patents - all the unglamorous infrastructure that makes a "terrific" factory possible - are the invisible partners in every origin story.
"Take a hunk" is deliberately un-ivy: plainspoken, almost folksy. It translates redistribution into something tactile, commonsense, even neighborly. And "paid forward for the next kid" shifts the frame from punishment to continuity. Taxes become a relay baton, not a confiscation. In context, this is a rebuttal to austerity-era rhetoric that treated government as a drag on growth. Warren flips it: public investment is the condition of growth, and the moral test of winners is whether they fund the on-ramp for whoever's next.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Elizabeth
Add to List
