Daily Inspiration Quote by Harry A. Blackmun

Blackmun is doing something judges rarely get credit for: exposing the emotional trick baked into a “common sense” metric. The line takes aim at a statute that treats expensive fundraising as inherently suspect, as if the percentage skimmed off the top can stand in for whether anyone was actually lied to. It’s a quiet demolition of a moral shortcut: the idea that efficiency equals honesty.

The specific intent is to separate what looks bad from what is illegal. “High solicitation costs” feel like a scandal because they offend a donor’s intuitive bargain: my money should go to the cause, not the pitch. Legislators love that intuition because it’s legible and enforceable. Blackmun, by contrast, insists that fraud is about deception, not disappointment. A charity can be wasteful, incompetent, or aggressively compensated without making a single false statement; a sleek operation can mislead with a straight face. The statute, he implies, punishes the wrong thing because it confuses a moral judgment (greed, waste) with a legal one (misrepresentation).

The subtext is First Amendment-adjacent: when the state uses cost ratios as a proxy for fraud, it isn’t just regulating bookkeeping; it’s regulating persuasion. Fundraising is speech, and speech is messy, variable, and sometimes expensive - especially for unpopular causes, new organizations, or groups without wealthy networks. Cost becomes a stand-in for legitimacy, and the law ends up laundering political and cultural bias through “neutral” numbers.

Placed in context of late-20th-century battles over charitable solicitation and consumer protection, the sentence reads like a warning: when government criminalizes optics, it invites enforcement driven by taste, not truth.