Whitewater’s had a decades-long problem of a few town insiders manipulating government and public resources for their own private ends. That time is drawing to a close, but there are yet some years ahead in which aging, mediocre town figures will push their self-promoting lies.
As their chief motivation is personal vanity and pride, they’ll not let go. On the contrary, they’ll look for any impressionable bureaucrat or politician they can find to perpetuate and extend their manipulations for another generation.
(They’ll know whom to find; like confidence men searching for an easy mark, they’ll find those they can dupe, cajole, or intimidate.)
There are three reasons these efforts will fail. It’s not commentary or criticism that will make the difference, but broader social forces that will make Whitewater inhospitable to this kind of trickery.
Economics. First and foremost, when Reed Hall of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation peddles crony capitalism and white-collar welfare at taxpayer expense, he peddles a false economics, a greedy policy, and a gutter ideology.
It is impossible that any number of these men have somehow developed an economic scheme more productive and more efficient than free transactions in the marketplace among private, voluntary parties.
One would have to believe, against all reason, that Reed Hall, Chancellor Telfer, former City Manager Brunner, and CDA Chair Knight have established a set of relationships superior to the market, superior to the teachings of Nobel laureates Hayek, Friedman, and James Buchanan.
They’ve done nothing of the kind. They’ve simply adopted the practices of vulgar banana republics abroad, and sprinkled them with legitimate economic terms used in illegitimate ways.
Mr. Clapper, at the so-called ‘special meeting’ for round two of taxpayer-grants to white-collar recipients, declared that these distributions were akin to chemical reactions, as though this were a true science.
No, Mr. Clapper, it’s not chemistry, but alchemy, you were extolling.
Politics. The building coalition against these sort of projects, nationally and statewide, of small-government conservatives, liberals, and libertarians will overwhelm a few oily flacks and their few duped friends.
There’s a whole series that could be entitled, “How a Few Conservatives Ruined Conservatism in Whitewater.” No one has done more damage to the GOP brand in Whitewater than a few local, big-government Republicans, a couple of big landlords and real estate agents, and the few misguided liberals and bureaucrats they’ve collected along the way.
The Right is reduced to hoping on red waves elsewhere to win here. It didn’t need to be this way – they did it to themselves.
It’s impossibly sad that local insiders ruined a party’s reputation this way. A new generation will have huge local damage to repair.
Picking this as a stand for the future is politically misguided. If one wanted something persuasive for the community – rather than persuasive merely for a few who’d like to bigfoot the rest of the town – no one would pick this.
One of Wisconsin’s major parties is now slamming the WEDC, no one in the Tea Party believes in it, and libertarians have never supported these proposals.
If one had to pick a political consultant, I’d suggest someone other than the flacks behind these handouts to the well-fed.
Selfishness. Richard Telfer contends, predictably, that this selfishness is a virtue, does he? He did all this for you, you see, so it’s not selfishness at all, but altruism.
Where are his supposed gains, great successes, and jobs, and at what price? Let him enumerate each job, the work performed, the true public cost, whether these few already have jobs (including public ones), etc.
Not merely names of so-called startups, but an actual accounting, based on accepted national standards of accounting and evaluation.
Statewide, when looking at what the WEDC has really done, it’s lies, exaggerations, and shoddy work.
But Mr. Telfer claims that he did it all for you, Argentina Whitewater:
Oh, no. These few did it for their own self-aggrandizement on the backs of ordinary wage-earners.
And that, truly, is why all of these schemes are heading for the dustbin.
say it, brother adams!
its about time we said what crap this is!
dont stop!
You’re spot on that they can’t let go. The city grabbed some money and the university moved in to keep it from being a total collapse from the start. The ongoing funding is about WEDC wanting to look successful. A few locals want to latch onto that money to seem important. It probably is right (as you recently said) that there’s a small audience for their marketing on this. Most people in town will never see anything from these grants. It’s not about the community as such but about a much smaller audience. People in town know that there’s nothing for them here.