Politics & Power Quote by Susan George

Redistribution isn’t framed here as a moral awakening; it’s framed as a balance-sheet problem with a body count. Susan George’s phrasing makes a deliberately cold claim: shifting wealth downward costs real money up front, and the people who’d pay are the ones least inclined to volunteer. That’s the intent - to puncture the comforting story that elites can be persuaded by fairness alone, or that inequality can be “managed” without a fight over who funds the transition.

The subtext is sharper: elites don’t concede because they’re convinced; they concede because they’re cornered. “The only time” is a dare, almost a diagnosis of political inertia. It implies that the normal state of affairs is elite resistance, and that reform arrives not through reasoned debate but through fear - fear of collapse, unrest, or delegitimization. By calling redistribution an “investment,” George also flips the usual austerity rhetoric. The costs aren’t waste; they’re the price of stabilizing a society whose inequalities have become economically and politically volatile.

The Roosevelt reference is doing heavy historical work. The New Deal wasn’t charity; it was a negotiated settlement forged under depression-era emergency, labor militancy, and the specter of radical alternatives. George invokes that moment to argue that crisis is the lever that moves entrenched power - and to hint that today’s elite-friendly policy consensus won’t bend until a comparable rupture forces it. It’s activism with a historian’s edge: a warning that if we wait for generosity, we’ll wait forever, and if we wait for crisis, we may not like what arrives with it.