Wealth & Money Quote by Mitch Daniels

Daniels’s line works because it flips the usual morality play of “give back” into a pragmatic pep talk: stop posing as saviors and start doing your day job well. In a single move, he recasts “corporate citizenship” from a virtue-signaling afterthought into a profit-first civic duty. That’s not an accident; it’s a politician’s way of flattering business leaders while also disciplining them. He’s telling them: you don’t get credit for intentions, you get credit for outcomes.

The subtext is a familiar Midwestern social contract dressed up as common sense. Economic growth is framed as the upstream cause that makes downstream generosity possible. Hiring becomes a civic act; philanthropy becomes surplus. The quote also quietly rebukes a certain kind of corporate public relations, the ribbon-cutting philanthropy that doesn’t change a payroll. “Make money” isn’t greed here; it’s the mechanism by which community institutions get funded and social problems get triaged.

Context matters: Daniels built a brand in Indiana around managerial competence, balanced budgets, and a pro-business climate. This is economic development rhetoric with a moral sheen, designed to reassure skeptical voters that courting corporations isn’t capitulation, it’s community-building. The persuasive trick is that it offers businesses a way to feel ethical without changing their incentives. The tension, of course, is what it omits: profit can arrive through wage suppression, extraction, or monopoly power. Daniels bets that growth and virtue mostly travel together, and he sells that bet with the blunt confidence of someone who wants the argument to feel settled.