Wealth & Money Quote by William E. Simon

Simon’s line reads like a commandment from the 1970s boardroom: stop treating productivity as an accounting footnote and make it the national religion. The phrasing is telling. “Must be the first economic consideration at all times” isn’t persuasion; it’s a hierarchy imposed. In Simon’s worldview, politics gets out of the way and output leads. Everything else - wages, working conditions, even distribution - is downstream.

The subtext is a rebuke to the postwar American compromise that tolerated unions, regulation, and social spending as the price of stability. By the time Simon served as Treasury Secretary (mid-1970s), that bargain looked fragile: stagflation, oil shocks, and rising global competition made “growth” feel less like destiny and more like a problem to solve. Productivity becomes his master key. If you fix it, he implies, innovation appears, jobs follow, wealth accumulates. The neat causal chain works rhetorically because it converts messy social conflict into a technical objective.

There’s also a quiet ideological move in the word “source.” Calling productivity the source of jobs and wealth sidelines questions about bargaining power, monopoly, or who captures the gains. It frames inequality not as a political outcome but as a math problem: raise the denominator (output per hour), and harmony returns. It’s a hard-edged, pro-market moral claim disguised as neutral economics - a message tailored to an era when faith in government was waning and “efficiency” was becoming the language of legitimacy.