Success Quote by Lee R. Raymond

Raymond’s line reads like a civics lesson rewritten by a CEO: political freedom isn’t the precondition for markets, he suggests, it’s the dividend. The phrasing does a lot of work. “Flow from all civic institutions” nods to courts, legislatures, a free press, the whole democratic toolkit, then quietly reroutes the origin story: those freedoms “fundamentally come from” market “success.” It’s a neat inversion that elevates capitalism from one institution among many into the engine room of the entire liberal order.

The intent is both ideological and strategic. As a longtime ExxonMobil chief, Raymond spent a career defending corporate latitude and deregulation; framing markets as the source of freedom turns criticism of business power into criticism of freedom itself. If markets are the root system, then restraints on markets look like threats to civic life rather than policy choices. “Success” is the key escape hatch: he doesn’t claim any market system yields liberty, only a successful one. That vagueness lets him point to prosperous democracies as proof while dodging the counterexamples of booming authoritarian capitalism or market shocks that erode rights.

Subtextually, it’s a story about legitimacy. Civic institutions are granted moral prestige, then markets claim it by association. The quote also smuggles in a hierarchy of values: economic growth is treated not as a goal to be balanced against rights, but as the condition that makes rights possible. In the late-20th-century boardroom worldview this reflects, freedom becomes less a guarantee of law than a byproduct of GDP, and citizenship starts to look suspiciously like consumer choice.