Years ago, in the 80s, when trade with Japan was controversial, Americans leveled legitimate criticisms about how Japan used dockside inspections of cargo as a way to prevent importation of foreign goods. The regulations were often small, and although rational individually, they were collectively irrational and counter-productive. By inhibiting free trade, Japan’s insidious protectionism actually harmed the Japanese economy and punished Japanese consumers.

Those years were a heady time for Japan. Aging executives believed that the decade ahead was sure to be a good one, and they must have felt that they had put behind the failed militarism of their youth for commercial conquest. Many Japanese were sure their nation was destined to dominate the global economy.

It didn’t work out that way: the 90s were a ‘lost decade’ for Japan. So certain of herself only a few years earlier, Japan’s bubble burst, and although she spent wildly in the 90s to spark a recovery, on public project after public project, Japan stagnated rather than grew.

The Japanese who established a regimen of anti-competitive inspections in the 80s were probably as sure of themselves as any men in modern times. The world was just destined to be theirs…

A quarter-century later, the world may be many things, but Japanese-dominated it’s not. If self-assurance alone shaped destiny, then the confidence of those Japanese leaders and executives would have made our world their world today.

Although Whitewater, Wisconsin isn’t Japan (!), I am occasionally reminded of Japanese hubris and dock-side inspections when I listen to a Whitewater Common Council session. A new idea is met with that same sort of subtle obstructionism. One will near that there will need to be a comparison to other communities, a study on the proposal, a study on the study on the proposal, a call for a task force, an assembling of the task force, a task force report, and then a study of the results of Whitewater’s task force compared with those of other communities silly enough to send proposals to task forces.

It’s what, after all, sensible people are just supposed to do.

It’s not, of course, what sensible people really do, when they want to consider an idea; it’s what obstructionists do when they want to cast an idea into the darkness, to be forgotten.

It’s an effective way to kill a proposal, in Whitewater, Washington, or Tokyo. Politicians and bureaucrats will be using the same techniques generations from now. And yet, they’ll impoverish their communities the same way.

This question remains for the bureaucrats and obstructionist politicians of my small town (and elsewhere): What have you done to allow us to overcome slow growth, unemployment, and child poverty? Why are we still beset with these conditions? Why, despite all your grand projects, built on taxes and on millions in public debt, are people still struggling?

Even in more prosperous times for America, why was Whitewater beset with such high child poverty — far above that of neighboring places or of America?

No groundbreaking, no press release, no fawning newspaper story, no skewed survey results, no distorted statistics, can hide the truth of actual, longstanding, difficult conditions in our small city.