Wealth & Money Quote by David Brooks

That line is a tidy little act of rhetorical laundering: it takes a moral charge (exploitation) and runs it through the dry-cleaner of market language (competition) until it comes out smelling like merit. “Exploit” implies a relationship, a power imbalance, a beneficiary and a harmed party. “Out-compete” implies a fair contest with rules everyone consented to. The move is not subtle, and that’s the point. It swaps a question about justice for a story about performance.

The subtext is a defense of hierarchy that doesn’t want to sound like one. If inequality is the scoreboard, then the rich are simply better players, not people sitting closer to the referee. It recasts structural advantage as individual excellence: better schools become “investment,” inherited networks become “social capital,” regulatory capture becomes “savvy,” cheap labor becomes “efficiency.” The poor don’t get wronged; they get “beat.”

Brooks’s broader lane in American commentary has often been to translate class outcomes into temperament, culture, and personal choices. In that context, this sentence functions like a closing argument: stop treating wealth as suspicious, stop treating poverty as evidence of someone else’s extraction. It’s also a political soothing mechanism. “Exploitation” demands remedies; “competition” demands resilience, maybe a skills program, certainly not a redistribution fight.

What makes it work is its veneer of neutrality. It sounds empirical, almost sportsmanlike, while smuggling in a big assumption: that the playing field is level enough for the verb “compete” to be morally exonerating.