Politics & Power Quote by Dixie Lee Ray

Perfection is never free; it just moves the bill to a different counter. Dixie Lee Ray frames “zero defects,” “zero pollution,” and “zero risk” as a seductive wish list that sounds humane but, in her telling, smuggles in an unpayable mandate. The line works because it yokes three moral absolutes to three economic nightmares, turning regulatory ambition into a kind of arithmetic curse: demand the impossible, get the catastrophic.

Ray’s intent is explicitly political, but the subtext is cultural. “Zero” isn’t just a number here; it’s a worldview, the technocratic fantasy that society can be engineered into flawlessness if only the rules are strict enough. By stacking “zero” three times, she mimics the rhythm of a slogan, then flips it into an anti-slogan: maximum government, zero growth, runaway inflation. It’s a neat rhetorical trap. If you’re drawn to the first triad, you’re meant to feel complicit in the second.

Context matters: Ray was a Democratic governor of Washington and a prominent critic of environmental and safety regulation during the 1970s and early 1980s, when inflation, energy shocks, and anxiety about “big government” were reshaping American politics. Her argument rides that era’s fear that regulation doesn’t merely restrain bad actors; it strangles the economy itself.

The quote also reveals an ideological bet: that markets tolerate some defect, some pollution, some danger as the price of prosperity. Ray isn’t denying the goals; she’s weaponizing their absolutism, insisting that “zero” is less ethics than enforcement, and enforcement is government by another name.