Politics & Power Quote by Kin Hubbard

A Midwestern deadpan dressed up as a policy critique, Hubbard’s line lands because it refuses the usual comfort of partisan hope. He’s not arguing about the merits of public ownership in the abstract; he’s arguing about what happens to any big institutional idea once it’s fed into America’s two-party machine. The punch is in the conditional: government ownership might sound promising, but “as long as we have Democrats and Republicans,” it will be handled by rival teams whose main incentive is to score points, protect turf, and reverse the other side’s gains.

Hubbard wrote in an era when “government ownership” wasn’t a seminar topic but a live political fight: railroads, utilities, municipal services, the lingering aftertaste of Progressivism, and the growing suspicion that both parties could be captured by the same business interests. His skepticism isn’t aimed only at government; it’s aimed at governance. The subtext is that public assets require continuity, competence, and a willingness to treat infrastructure like infrastructure rather than like a campaign prop. A duopoly built for elections is built for churn.

There’s also a sly populist bite: Democrats and Republicans are presented less as ideologies than as brands. Hubbard implies that the parties’ first loyalty is to themselves, not to the public project they’d be tasked to run. The wit works because it collapses a complicated debate (state vs. market) into a more corrosive diagnosis: any ownership model fails when management is structurally incentivized to fight rather than to steward.