Over at Rock Netroots, Lou Kaye makes this accurate observation about how most local communities’ officials understand development:
For the most part, city leaders here [he’s referring to Janesville] and across Wisconsin not only believe that communities are in competition with one another, they vigorously support and fuel those concepts by carving out special slush accounts from modest local tax treasuries just for business “incentives.”
That’s very true, but I’d add this modification: that officials think that the competition they face is part of a zero-sum game, a fight over finite and fixed resources. (That’s implicit, I think, in Kaye’s remarks, but it’s worth stating.)
For the most part, Wisconsin’s local officials, development gurus, marketing & PR men, and lobbyists have a narrow, pre-capitalist, finite view of economic possibilities. One man’s gain is another man’s loss; one town’s gain is another town’s loss.
They’d fit right in with the mercantilists of three to five-hundred years ago. It’s as though the profoundly transformative power of capitalism, market theory, and free markets had never happened – these men are the modern-day practitioners of a (profoundly) lesser way of economic life.
These re-worked ideas of the past are inferior, and offer neither real nor lasting prosperity for the communities that fall under their sway. It’s just battening on the worry and uncertainty of others.
The men who tout these development schemes present themselves as community champions, as though they were demi-gods come among mere (and struggling) mortals.
In this, I am reminded of Captain America’s reply to Natasha Romonoff, when facing men who displayed seemingly mythical powers —
Natasha Romanoff: I’d sit this one out, Cap.
Steve Rogers: I don’t see how I can.
Natasha Romanoff: These guys come from legend. They’re basically gods.
Steve Rogers: There’s only one God, ma’am, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.