Wealth & Money Quote by Arthur C. Brooks

Brooks isn’t just defending capitalism here; he’s laundering a moral claim through the language of mechanics. “Matching up people’s skills, interests, and abilities” frames free enterprise as a kind of benevolent sorting algorithm, a system that rewards authenticity and effort by design. The rhetoric is soothing: success isn’t seized or inherited, it’s “earned” because the market is portrayed as an honest broker between who you are and what you get.

Then comes the hard pivot: redistribution is reduced to “simply” spreading money around. That word does a lot of ideological work. It turns policy into petty shuffling, stripping away any rationale about risk, bargaining power, inherited advantage, or the fact that markets also “spread money around” according to rules governments write and enforce. Redistribution is cast not as a corrective but as a distortion, and Brooks chooses a clinical verb - “attenuates” - to make the harm feel objective rather than partisan.

The subtext is a worldview where inequality can be unfortunate but is still preferable to tinkering with incentives, because incentives are treated as the primary engine of both prosperity and virtue. “Perverting” is the tell: it moralizes economics, implying redistribution isn’t merely inefficient, it’s corrupting. Context matters, too. Brooks has built a career arguing that opportunity is best protected by market dynamism and civil society rather than expansive welfare states. This line is designed to move the debate from compassion-versus-cruelty to competence-versus-sabotage: if you want people to thrive, don’t help them directly - protect the system that forces them to earn it.