Yesterday, I posted about Whitewater local government’s unfortunate (and likely cynical) embrace of one side concerning competition between types of local businesses. See, Whitewater Local Government’s Favoritism of Some Local Businesses Over Others. This is a legitimate, private debate that Whitewater’s local government should not have embraced — this city administration over-reaches when it favors some businesses over others.
I mentioned that this city manager probably doesn’t understand these limits on government; on the contrary, he acts as a kind of third-tier, taxpayer-funded developer all too often, picking supposed winners, and rejecting supposed losers. He draws his salary from, and uses the receipts of, taxpayers’ earnings. Not one of his grand projects involves his own money; he risks the money of others, acquired not voluntarily from investors, but through taxation. There is no easier, more risk-free way, to be a wheeler-dealer.
(Wisconsin should enact a law that, for each grand project, an otherwise uninvested city bureaucrat should have to put up ten-percent of his personal wealth. We’d have fewer white elephants, failed tax incremental districts, etc.)
Setting aside city government’s illegitimate adoption of a legitimate private campaign, one finds in this Whitewater’s much greater problem: the general desire to use government for favoring of some local groups over others.
Consider the following map, of Whitewater, from Google Maps:
Who lives here? Thousands of people, and I would say — insist really — that each and every one of them who lives here is local, as government and the law should define the term. Private parties may decide for themselves, but government should not — must not — choose preferentially for some over others.
Yet, is that not one of the chronic diseases that afflicts our local government, that it favors some over others, though they are all residents?
When government itself considers some businesses — although all are within our city limits, all paying taxes — more local, then who doubts that this sends a message that some residents are more local than others?
This is not a city manager, nor is this a city administration, with a ‘common touch.’ On the contrary, this is an administration that vacillates wildly between different factions among a small, stodgy, dissipated group. There one finds this administration’s supposed leadership. If our municipal manager had a symbol, it would be the weather vane, favoring and spinning toward one faction within our small group of town squires. These town squires preside over a town beset with real problems, of which they are more responsible than everyone else, combined.
Where a sensible person sees only residents, all local by their residency here, Whitewater sees those who are truly local and those who aren’t. In enforcement, in attention, in direction, Whitewater’s government is lousy with a short-sighted bias for a few over others. So opportunistic is this city manager, so vacillating between one project to the next, that he cannot see the damage this does to principle and fairness.
The most some of these short-sighted, and mediocre, few think is that the cure for bias is to include a few more in their circle. That’s their idea of inclusion: that you, too, might be one of their small circle! No person who values the political traditions of this beautiful republic should be inclined to sit at table or trough with that ilk. The price of admission into that society is a lemming’s heart; that’s a price no one should, or need, pay.
One may talk about diversity and inclusion all one wishes. We will have neither until we have a new and better understanding of the proper, limited role of government in Whitewater: serving all equally, favoring none.