The Twin Towers Project: A Cautionary Tale makes a point I hadn’t heard before:
It’s cruelly ironic that the terrorists who attacked New York on September 11 targeted the World Trade Center as a symbol of American capitalism. For, from the moment it opened its doors in the early 1970s, the center, owned and operated by the publicly funded Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, was really a grandiose monument to the ills of state capitalism, where government substitutes its bureaucratic and politically motivated thinking for the wisdom of the free market’s invisible hand. Indeed, the WTC offers a case study in why government should not be in the business of developing and managing commercial property.