There’s a troubling thread that continues to run through far too many alleged economic development “solutions”: Taxpayer dollars.
Look around. The practice is insidious. And it has been for scores of years. And despite its deleterious effects – the further and deeper socialization of financial risk for private economic gain with little aggregate economic growth – it now is fully entrenched as standard operating procedure for governments local, state and national.
Once upon a time (and, no, not in some ancient fairytale), private developers would be expected to pay for increased demand their respective projects would place on the public infrastructure, from new highway interchanges to beefed up sewerage.
But modern convention is that the public is not only forced to pay for such things in the name of the “intangible,” expansively defined, “public good” but for some, much or all of the very structures in which some respective companies do business.
The practice really raced off the rails of sound public policy with the explosion of taxpayer-funded sports facilities. And it wasn’t just a matter of public acquisition of private lands and paying for ancillary infrastructure. It became (and in too many cases, still is) public dollars being conscripted to pay for the majority of sports stadia construction costs.
And it certainly hasn’t stopped there. Even Pittsburgh’s big banks long have been bellying up to the bar of taxpayer subsidies. Think PNC Financial and FNB Corp., combined gleeful recipients of tens of millions of public dollars to build themselves new skyscrapers. All, of course, in the name of the “public good” in pursuit of the latest government-directed scheme to guarantee economic “renewal” (if not outright “renaissance”) that never seems to come.
And it all has evolved – devolved, in reality – to nothing less than governments’ prosecution of a full-blown industrial policy.
We see it – and “it” being a massive raid on the public kitty – for government-directed, and invariably faulty, economic designs.
Think massive taxpayer subsidies for computer chips, in a domestic marketplace that already was responding to a shortage.
Think massive taxpayer subsidies to automakers to force, by hook and by crook, a conversion to still unproven, and in many ways, less-environmentally friendly electric vehicles.
Think massive taxpayer subsidies to “carbon capture,” a still-largely unproven technology whose environmental effects stand to be as disastrous as the massive mining operations required to secure the rare elements necessary for those “clean” battery-powered vehicles.
And as we repeatedly, sadly and tragically have been forced to remind, the list goes on and on.
Truth be told, this is not simply the kind of “troubling thread” we referenced at the outset but an intellectual hole in the head of the body politic.
Unchallenged and unchecked, it truly is the road to societal serfdom, if not the road to economic perdition.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
