Wealth & Money Quote by Richard Baker

Baker’s line is a politician’s admonition dressed up as a proverb: a warning to a culture that treats the body as collateral for the bank account. “To get rich never risk your health” opens like practical advice, almost managerial in its confidence. Then he tightens the screw with a rhetorical loop - “health is the wealth of wealth” - turning an economic vocabulary back on itself. If wealth is the ultimate metric in public life, he suggests, health is the underlying currency that makes all other “success” spendable.

The intent is protective but also quietly disciplinary. This isn’t just a self-help reminder; it’s a moral boundary drawn around ambition. In political context, that boundary can point in two directions: toward individual responsibility (don’t grind yourself into illness chasing status), and toward public responsibility (a society that forces people to trade health for income is structurally dishonest). The phrase’s repetition works like a campaign slogan: sticky, symmetrical, easy to quote. It also smuggles in a critique without naming villains - employers, markets, even voters’ appetites for relentless productivity.

Subtextually, Baker is challenging the American-style romance of overwork: the myth that the body will obediently follow the will. By framing health as the “wealth of wealth,” he implies that money acquired at the expense of the self is counterfeit prosperity: impressive on paper, useless when the bill finally comes due.