Politics & Power Quote by Lee Iacocca

Iacocca delivers this like a shop-floor punchline: the government "can't do" competence, and the proof is sitting right there in two big, familiar systems everyone loves to complain about. It works because it borrows the rhythm of common sense. No charts, no ideology lecture - just a blunt syllogism dressed as a quip. The line "run anything" is deliberately absolute, the kind of exaggeration that signals confidence more than accuracy. That's the point: he's not arguing policy; he's asserting an attitude.

The subtext is managerial moralism. Coming from a CEO who became a folk hero for rescuing Chrysler, the quote performs a contrast between private-sector turnaround culture and public-sector inertia. "Run" is doing double duty: it means operating, but it also implies discipline, urgency, and consequences. In Iacocca's world, failure gets you fired; in his caricature of government, failure gets you a bigger budget.

The choice of targets matters. The post office and railroads aren't random - they're legacy institutions with unions, politics, and mandates beyond profit. Calling them "bankrupt" collapses a messy reality (public service obligations, pricing rules, geographic coverage) into a single business metric. That's the rhetorical trick: redefine success as balance-sheet health, then declare government incapable by definition.

Contextually, this slots neatly into late-20th-century American skepticism about federal competence, when deregulation and Reagan-era rhetoric made "government is the problem" feel like savvy realism. Iacocca isn't just criticizing programs; he's laundering an ideological claim through the credibility of a guy who "ran things" for a living.