When capital flees, ask who drove it out

The National Review reports that Ken Griffin has just made the largest private gift to American higher education in history — and that he directed it to Miami, not to the great cities of the progressive coasts that once competed for his presence and his dollars. That fact should be read not as a trophy for one political faction but as a signal flare for anyone serious about public finance and national vigor.

I have never believed that great private fortunes are inherently virtuous. Concentrated private power without adequate check is precisely the condition I warned against when I argued for a strong national commerce power and a federally chartered bank. The purpose of those instruments was not to celebrate wealth — it was to discipline it, to make it serve the public credit and the productive enterprise of the nation rather than extract from both. Bashing a wealthy man in a speech costs nothing. Designing the institutions that actually govern his power — that is the work.

And that is where the cities named in this account appear to have failed. Rhetoric against billionaires is cheap. What is not cheap is the research infrastructure, the graduate training, the scientific capacity that private philanthropy on this scale can fund. When a city's political culture makes a donor feel unwelcome — not through law, not through legitimate regulation, but through theatrical contempt — it does not wound the donor. It wounds the university that loses the gift. It wounds the students who do not receive the scholarship. It wounds the city that needed the anchor institution.

I must be plain about where I stand on the underlying question of inequality: it is a real problem, and I do not dismiss it. A republic in which productive capacity and political influence concentrate in too few hands is unstable — I knew that in my own century and nothing I can infer about yours changes it. But the answer is law, taxation properly administered, regulated markets with genuine competition — not the performance of disdain. One does not make a great city by making it inhospitable to the very capital it then seeks to attract through tax abatements.

The deeper point, which I would press on any governor or mayor reading this column, is about sequencing. First, build the institutions — transparent, rule-bound, energetically administered — that can direct private wealth toward public purposes. A national bank did not celebrate bankers; it used banking for the republic's ends. Only then, with those instruments in hand, does one have standing to impose conditions. Scolding without structure is not governance; it is theater, and capital — which is nothing if not mobile — will find a better audience.

Miami, by inference from this account, offered something more than warmth. It offered a working relationship between private ambition and civic purpose. I am not prepared to say that is the whole of sound policy. But I am prepared to say it is a necessary part. My recommendation to the cities that lost this gift: stop congratulating yourselves for the denunciation, and start building the institutions — the development banks, the research compacts, the infrastructure authorities — that make private capital want to be useful to you. That is not capitulation to wealth. That is the energetic use of government to make the market serve the republic.