Leadership Quote by Jim McDermott

McDermott’s line is a politician’s tightrope walk: defend capitalism’s legitimacy while indicting its habits. “There’s nothing wrong” is a disarming opening meant to preempt the reflexive charge of being anti-business. It’s also a strategic concession, the kind that signals he understands the American catechism: markets are not just an economic arrangement but a cultural identity. By starting there, he frames himself as a reformer, not a revolutionary.

Then the sentence pivots on “But,” and the real message arrives: the system may be sound in theory, yet it fails in practice when it treats human fallout as collateral damage. “Has to” is doing heavy lifting. It’s not a plea for charity; it’s a demand for governance. Compassion isn’t offered as a private virtue but as a design requirement, implying regulation, social insurance, labor protections, and a public sector willing to correct what markets predictably ignore.

The subtext is an argument about moral accounting. Free enterprise excels at pricing goods; it’s notoriously bad at pricing grief: layoffs that hollow out towns, medical debt, housing insecurity, the long tail of inequality. McDermott’s era - late-20th-century neoliberal consensus through the post-2008 aftershocks - made that gap harder to dismiss. The quote positions compassion as the missing infrastructure of legitimacy: without it, “free” becomes a euphemism for unaccountable power.

It’s persuasive because it borrows the system’s own language of pragmatism. Compassion isn’t sentimental; it’s portrayed as the condition that keeps the machine from eating its operators.