Wealth & Money Quote by Chester Brown

The line lands like a deadpan confession from the machine room of modern life: not a defense of psychiatric care, but a cost-benefit justification for exile. Chester Brown frames “stranger behaviour” as an operational hazard, the way a logistics manager might talk about a broken conveyor belt. That’s the point. By letting the speaker sound bluntly reasonable, Brown exposes how easily cruelty can dress itself up as efficiency.

The diction is chillingly corporate. “Economic productivity” becomes the supreme moral metric, and “anybody who slows down” is recast as a bottleneck rather than a person. Even the casual “off they go” carries the violence of removal disguised as administrative tidiness. The psychiatric institution isn’t described as treatment or support; it’s described as a “place,” a storage solution. Brown is poking at the historical overlap between mental health systems and social control: confinement as a way to keep public space, workplaces, and profit cycles free of disruption.

As a cartoonist, Brown understands how satire works through compression. He strips the argument down to its ugliest skeleton, so the reader can’t hide behind euphemisms like “public safety” or “wellness.” The subtext is a critique of a culture that treats deviation - poverty, trauma, neurodivergence, visible distress - as a threat to throughput. The joke isn’t that the speaker is a villain; it’s that the speaker is familiar, echoing the quiet logic that underwrites “zero tolerance,” hostile architecture, and the impatience baked into everyday capitalism.