Lori Lightfoot realizes that government depends on the private sector for money

For years, neoliberals have made the claim that successful laissez faire capitalists have made their money on the backs of public sector.

As President Obama said in an infamous 2012 speech, “If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own… If you were successful, someone somewhere along the line gave you some help… Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive… You didn’t build that… The Internet didn’t get created on its own. Government research created the Internet so then all the companies could make money off the Internet…”

This “You didn’t build that” mentality is one of the worst economic fallacies because the entity that Obama credits with helping all these people by some great creative benevolence—the government—actually depends on the private sector for everything it does.

The government gets all of its wealth through taxation. The federal government, of course, creates money out of thin air through inflationary Federal Reserve policy, but that’s not creating wealth and it’s just another form of regressive taxation. Government doesn’t create wealth, it just takes it from the private sector.

And many big state politicians are discovering this since the pandemic.

Recently liberal Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot tweeted her dismay of discovering that her lockdowns during the pandemic, which put a lot of companies out of business, is coming back to haunt the government which depends on the tax revenues from those companies.

Yes, government produces some good that businesses then capitalize on. But government depends 100 percent on the fruits of the businesses in the economy. Businesses make wealth and government consumes it. That’s the truth that Obama never acknowledged and that’s biting Lightfoot in the rear.