Creativity Quote by Tom Scholz

Scholz’s line lands like a guitar riff with the gain turned up: simple, forceful, and engineered to stick. As a musician best known for arena-sized polish, he’s not performing policy nuance here; he’s drawing a moral boundary around an economic story Americans have been sold for decades. “Turning corporations loose” frames deregulation as literal unshackling, implying the restraints were there for a reason: to keep power from doing what power does when no one’s watching. Then he adds “profit motive run amok,” a phrase that treats profit not as a neutral incentive but as a kind of intoxication. It’s not anti-business so much as anti-blank-check.

The intent is corrective: to challenge the reflexive idea that freer markets automatically produce freer people. Scholz is arguing that “more livable” isn’t a synonym for “more profitable,” and that the metrics corporations optimize for (quarterly returns, growth, shareholder value) often externalize their costs onto everyone else: polluted air, precarious work, hollowed-out communities. The subtext is a quiet accusation that the public has been trained to accept damage as “the price of doing business,” while the beneficiaries call it efficiency.

Context matters: coming from a rock musician, this reads less like a white paper than a cultural protest against the corporate creep into everything - politics, media, labor, even identity. It’s a reminder that deregulation isn’t an abstract ideology; it’s a lived environment. Scholz’s punchline is that a world run like a balance sheet eventually feels like one, too: optimized, extractive, and increasingly uninhabitable.