Leadership Quote by Jerry Brown

Brown is doing a neat bit of political aikido: borrowing the language of the left (equality, charity, care) to argue against the default religion of modern governance, the market. The phrase "restore power" implies something has been taken - not by a single villain, but by an operating system: decades of policy that treated people less as neighbors than as consumers, and problems less as civic obligations than as transactions.

"Family, neighborhood, and community" is a deliberately old-fashioned ladder of belonging. It sidesteps the sterile state-versus-market cage match by proposing a third arena where responsibility is intimate and reputational. You can stiff a corporation and still sleep; try doing that to the people who see you at the grocery store. Brown is betting that social proximity can enforce ethics where price signals can't.

The subtext is both critique and invitation. He is admitting that technocratic fixes and growth metrics won't cure loneliness, inequality, or civic distrust. Calling it a "non-market principle" is also a warning: if every relationship is monetized, the social fabric becomes a subcontractor. But he doesn't romanticize this as nostalgia; he frames it as "the creative challenge", positioning community-building as design work, not moralizing. That's classic Brown: a politician with a monkish streak, skeptical of grand systems, trying to smuggle solidarity into an era that rewards atomization. The line lands because it treats care as infrastructure - not sentiment - and because it dares to say what few elected officials say plainly: some of what holds a society together can't be bought.