Before the budget, before the municipal administration, politicians, bureaucrats, and back-patters, is a city of fourteen-thousand. Most of these fourteen-thousand have, sensibly, more important concerns than the latest, supposedly extraordinary and exceptional (excuse me, exceptional! bureaucratic achievement.
Little over a month ago, there was a rare mention, for Whitewater, of (child) poverty. Our poverty rate is high, but it’s traditionally been impolitic to discuss as much. We live in a city where about one in four children live in poverty and distress.
I am convinced, absolutely convinced, that the way out for Whitewater is an abandonment of over-bearing regulation, fussy management, manipulative and coercive partnerships with a mediocre municipal administration, and instead through the chance to make Whitewater a center of opportunity, in reality, and not merely in rhetoric.
Our comparative and attractive advantage should rest with how little we interfere with productive, and private, initiatives. No grant, no public borrowing, no taxes, will ever be as useful as the energies of productive, private citizens to build, grow, donate, and enrich.
Even those who’d advocate another alternative must see that incremental, marquee projects have made no difference to the fundamental condition of thousands in Whitewater. These projects, at taxpayer expense and though public borrowing, are mere ornaments to bureaucratic pride. They’re screens, curtains, and diversions from the real condition of thousands in the city.
We live in this small city, and go about political discussions within it, as though we were something we’re not, so eager are we to herald every supposed project as proof that we lead the state, nation, whatever.
We’ll not improve this way; those who trumpet these supposed bureaucratic triumphs are incredible to sensible people. That’s because ordinary people live and experience conditions unlike the
sugary and empty claims of our town’s politicians and career bureaucrats.
They’re talking only to themselves, and a small circle of others, in a city of thousands.
http://www.blip.tv/file/2632278