Science Quote by Richard Stallman

Stallman takes a folksy metaphor his opponents love - capitalism as a clean, meritocratic footrace - and then quietly pulls the pin. The first sentence grants the intuition that makes market rhetoric so sticky: prizes can motivate effort, and sometimes that produces real gains. It’s a tactical concession, not an endorsement. By opening with “when capitalism really works this way,” he implies an awkward truth: much of what gets sold as competition isn’t a race at all, but a rigged course, a gated track, or a relay where some runners start miles ahead.

The subtext is Stallman’s lifelong grievance with corporate power in computing: monopolies, lock-in, patents, proprietary standards, and surveillance capitalism don’t reward “running faster” so much as they reward building tollbooths. In software, the winner often doesn’t win because they wrote the best code; they win because they controlled distribution, dictated file formats, sued rivals, or made exit costly. That’s not the moral drama of individual excellence; it’s market structure.

His intent is also to puncture the lazy absolutism of capitalist apologetics. “Its defenders are wrong in assuming it always works this way” is a rebuke of ideology pretending to be realism. Stallman isn’t arguing against incentives; he’s arguing for diagnosing the mechanism. If competition is supposed to serve the public by improving products and lowering costs, then we have to ask when “rewarding the winner” accelerates progress and when it just concentrates power. The line reads like a scientist’s control clause: results depend on conditions, and the defenders keep skipping the conditions.