Justice & Law Quote by Dennis Prager

Prager is playing a familiar populist chord: scale doesn’t just make institutions efficient, it makes them emotionally numb. “Callous,” “colder,” “heart” are deliberately moralized words, smuggling an ethical indictment into what sounds like a structural observation. The point isn’t that bureaucracies and big firms sometimes behave badly; it’s that bigness itself allegedly manufactures indifference, because distance erases accountability.

The move that matters comes after the symmetry. He grants that corporations can be just as heartless, then snaps the comparison in two with a libertarian get-out-of-jail clause: competition and the absence of “police powers.” That phrase is doing heavy rhetorical work. It recasts the state not merely as a service provider but as a legitimate coercer, capable of forcing compliance when it’s wrong. Corporations, in this framing, can pressure you, even exploit you, but they can’t legally cage you. The moral hierarchy is set: corporate coldness is regrettable; state coldness is dangerous.

The subtext is a defense of limited government that tries to sound empirically even-handed. By conceding corporate callousness, Prager inoculates himself against the obvious charge of being pro-business at any cost. Yet the concession is conditional, because “competition” is treated as a constant solvent that dissolves cruelty. That assumption quietly ignores monopoly power, regulatory capture, and the way private actors can piggyback on state force through contracts, law, and lobbying.

Contextually, it fits late-20th/early-21st century American conservative media: skepticism of centralized authority, faith in market discipline, and a moral vocabulary designed to make political economy feel like character judgment.