Success Quote by William Graham Sumner

A slap in the face disguised as civic hygiene: if you can lose your property through stupidity, you probably deserve to. Sumner’s line is doing two things at once. On the surface, it reads like a tidy libertarian principle - government should not function as an insurance policy for bad choices. Underneath, it’s a moral sorting machine. Property isn’t just an asset here; it’s a proxy for virtue, competence, and “fitness.” If the market punishes you, the punishment is recast as instruction.

The specific intent is to delegitimize protective legislation - bankruptcy relief, consumer protections, limits on predatory lending, even regulations meant to stabilize panics. By framing these as “laws to guarantee property,” Sumner implies that reformers are smuggling in a guarantee of outcomes rather than setting fair rules of play. The cleverness lies in the word “folly”: it reduces structural risk (fraud, monopoly power, boom-bust cycles) to personal idiocy, making collective remedies feel like indulgence.

The context matters. Sumner wrote in the Gilded Age, when industrial capitalism was hardening into an ideology and social Darwinist reasoning gave elite self-interest a storybook spine. Rapid fortunes were made; rapid ruin was common; labor unrest and populist politics threatened the legitimacy of the new order. In that climate, declaring that no law should shield owners from themselves is also a way of shielding the system from scrutiny. If failure is folly, then inequality is just a scoreboard.

It’s a bracing sentence because it weaponizes common sense. Everyone knows someone who made a dumb bet. Sumner turns that familiar annoyance into a worldview: compassion becomes “guarantee,” and governance becomes weakness.