Wealth & Money Quote by Paul A. Volcker

Volcker’s line lands like a quiet rebuke from a man who spent his life inside the machinery of money and still refused to worship it. The phrasing matters: “the subject of life” isn’t “the point” or “the goal.” It’s almost curricular, as if he’s asking what the central topic is before we start doing homework. Then he punctures the default syllabus with a blunt, schoolyard question: “to get rich?” The simplicity is strategic. It strips away the elegant excuses that finance culture builds around itself - efficiency, innovation, “value creation” - and forces the listener into an moral accounting, not a financial one.

The most revealing word is “dancing.” Volcker isn’t accusing the rich of outright evil; he’s implying distraction, performative motion, a kind of celebratory churn that looks purposeful from the outside. Dancing is what you do when the music is loud enough to drown out the harder questions. In his mouth, it becomes an indictment of a system that rewards agility and appetite while treating meaning as an externality.

Context sharpens the edge. As the Federal Reserve chair who engineered punishingly high interest rates to crush inflation, Volcker accepted political pain in the name of long-term stability. He understood wealth as something that can be protected or distorted by policy - and how quickly a society can confuse the scoreboard for the game. Coming from an economist, the provocation is pointed: if even the high priest of monetary discipline suspects that “getting rich” is a decoy, what does that say about the culture that treats it as the main event?