Whitewater, Wisconsin is divided between two congressional districts, one of which is served by Rep. Paul Ryan. The online Washington Examiner has a brief opinion piece called, “Paul Ryan’s Free-Market Populism.” The article mentions an essay that Ryan recently wrote for Forbes in which he decried the tendency of large corporations to seek government handouts at every turn.
Ryan’s right, of course, that big business seeks big government support whenever possible. It’s also true that by their nature, free markets are populist – they offer greater opportunity for success and prosperity for ordinary people than any other economic arrangement.
Unfortunately, people sometimes confuse – and a few deliberately distort – markets and large corporations. They’re not the same at all. An unfettered market is a place of free exchange between buyers and sellers, of goods or of labor time. The large corporation is merely an organization, and even (and often especially) in an oppressive place one finds large businesses.
Ryan is right to draw the distinction between big businesses and markets, and to emphasize the liberation from poverty that markets offer millions of ordinary people across the world.
Even in a small town, one often finds that what passes for a Republican is really a someone who favors a different kind of business from a progressive, rather than a free market that favors no form of business except what buyers and sellers find momentarily advantageous.
That’s why, after a short time in office, a proud Republican often becomes a proud defender of city or state programs, plans, projects, etc.
Nationally, Republicans in Congress spent too much, legislated too intrusively, and for their efforts they found only defeat at the hands of those who see even greater promise in government regulation and control.
One will hear calls to prop up this business or that, but not a commitment to clear obstacles from the markets that are the foundation of prosperity. On the contrary, the right merely advances a difference list of preferred projects. The spending on these projects amounts to about the same paltry result.
In a small town like Whitewater, it’s nearly obvious to many so-called conservatives in office that community progress and development require a million here, a million there, of tax receipts or public debt. There’s not even any serious question about it. It’s the price of being civic-minded, in the eyes of those in office or on public committees.
One sees it in other places, too. Sometimes a small church will struggle with how to grow, or combat decline, and someone will say: We need to build bigger. (I am not referring to any place in particular, and here I am addressing only those parishes that are struggling, not ones that are growing and need more room.)
So, rather than a message, a clear creed, someone contends that if only everything were bigger or brighter, hundreds of new parishioners would walk into the sanctuary. All the things that might draw one to the faith, other than the faith itself, are a hopeless waste of effort.
In a small town, politics emphasizes the structural over the substantive and principled. So, it matters to those in power how things look, and not nearly so much on what principles things run.
Tax incremental financing is the public version of the ‘if we build it, they will come’ plan for community improvement. Yet for all the proud chatter of a million here or there, the fundamental conditions of rural poverty in Whitewater are unaffected. We have as many destitute children as before all these vainglorous projects began.
We aren’t even the same afterward as before, as we’ve spent what we had, and borrowed more, for no change in misery otherwise ignored.
There might have been a time – not so long ago, really – when conservatives in a small town would have preferred the market to the trough. They might at least have expected some return for an investment in a gilded trough.
Not at all; the answer to a poor result is just more of the same.
Of Rep. Ryan’s remarks, see Ryan on Free-Market Populism.