Chicago Mayor Richard Daley — a liberal Democrat, no less — recently commented that “almost 95 percent” of his city’s skyscrapers were private sector constructions. He then said, “I don’t think Democrats realize how important business is to our economy and to our cities.”
Evasion has its limits. Sooner or later, even liberals will have to acknowledge that if you take the capital out of capitalism, you’re left with eventual poverty, stagnation and despair. Government doesn’t build skyscrapers; the private sector does. Will all liberals — or even all conservatives, for that matter — ever own up to this? No way. But the better ones will. Mayor Daley, so far as I understand it, is just another corrupt politician, so I mean no compliment to him. But that’s precisely my point. When even a rotten machine politician has to admit the truth, then eventually everyone will. The worse things get, and the more people realize what they’re losing, the more they might start to grasp where it came from. We’ve got a long way to go in this regard, but crisis has a way of making people see in 20/20.