Wealth & Money Quote by Richard Stallman

Stallman is smuggling a whole moral philosophy into the plain clothes of economics: restraint isn’t saintliness, it’s systems engineering. The line reads like a civics lesson, but its real target is the myth that any tactic is justified if it “works” for the individual. He frames “destructive means” not as a private vice but as a scaling problem. One person exploiting, hoarding, sabotaging, or enclosing shared resources can look like clever optimization; everyone doing it becomes a denial-of-service attack on society itself.

The phrase “good citizen” is doing quiet work. Stallman isn’t appealing to politeness or patriotism; he’s invoking a role with obligations, the way a network node has responsibilities if the network is to function. That’s classic Stallman: ethics expressed as infrastructure. His deeper claim is that wealth isn’t merely accumulated; it’s produced inside a cooperative ecology (laws, norms, shared knowledge). When you loot the ecology to enrich yourself, you’re burning the inputs that made enrichment possible.

Context matters. As the founder of the free software movement, Stallman has spent decades arguing that certain “successful” business practices - proprietary lock-in, restrictive licensing, surveillance-driven extraction - are socially destructive even when they generate profit. The quote reads like an all-purpose argument against enclosure: you can’t build a thriving commons if everyone’s incentive is to fence it off. He’s also making a rebuttal to libertarian moral minimalism. The yardstick isn’t “did I get richer?” but “does this behavior generalize without collapsing the system?” In that test, predation fails fast.