Politics & Power Quote by Gordon Smith

“The American people are being victimized more than any free market would warrant” is the kind of line that tries to do two jobs at once: channel populist anger while staying safely inside the rhetoric of market faith. Gordon Smith doesn’t denounce capitalism; he denounces a distortion of it. The phrase “more than any free market would warrant” is a neat political hedge. It implies victimization is real, but also normalizes a certain amount of it as the acceptable cost of doing business. Not “victimized, period,” but victimized beyond the proper quota.

That’s the subtext: the market is still the referee, not the defendant. Smith positions himself as a defender of ordinary people without sounding like a regulator by instinct. He’s implicitly accusing someone (corporations, monopolies, middlemen, insurers, lenders) of gaming the system, not accusing the system itself. “Victimized” is a morally loaded verb; it frames consumers as targets rather than participants, stripping away the idea that bad outcomes are just the result of personal choice. It also creates permission for intervention - but only the kind that can be sold as restoring competition, not expanding government.

In context, this is classic late-20th/early-21st century American center-right economics: trust the market in theory, police it in practice when the squeeze becomes politically visible. The sentence works because it translates policy into a simple emotional narrative - people are getting played - while keeping the speaker’s ideological credentials intact.