A quick summary of my views on business would be to say that
(1) private markets are typically superior to government regulation, subsidies, or game-rigging,
(2) government should be impartial to different kinds of businesses,
(3) government ‘business’ or ‘development’ efforts are often self-promoting efforts of officials, bureaucrats, and hangers-on who are parasitic of public money and power,
(4) and if we are to have public spending, it should go to those who are less well-off, not those who are plump, flush, and bloated even now.
This brings me to our local merchants, a topic to which I and others often return. I’ve had doubts about some of their direction, and been supportive of other efforts.
And yet, I see that our small merchants are far more deserving than the projects on which we’ve spent – and mostly wasted – millions.
There was a scheduled downtown cleanup today, from Downtown Whitewater, Inc.
Consider this passage from Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities:
….storekeepers and other small businessmen are typically strong proponents of peace and order themselves; they hate broken windows and holdups; they hate having customers made nervous about safety. They are great street watchers and sidewalk guardians if present in sufficient numbers….
Although our small city isn’t like the ones about which Jacobs was writing, this passage yet fits us, too. Merchants’ care for their own spaces improves public life for all.
We’ve a perception problem in town, among a few town notables, who believe that an investment in something that sounds tech-oriented is necessarily better than an investment in a store merchant’s or restaurateur’s efforts.
These few would pick bytes, so to speak, over bricks. (And of bricks, they’d go for big ones – however unneeded, expensive, or even environmentally risky – over small ones.)
There are – right now – tens of thousands of programs, applications, and methods privately produced and available for purchase.
Still, somehow, we’re supposed to believe that America needs the next great app, for tens of thousands to publicly-employed, white-collar academics.
Business is the place for business products. Free markets are the place where they should be offered and purchased.
There’s a role for research money at university – indeed, America leads the world in fundamental theoretical and experimental science.
That lead, however, does not come from public subsidies to tech ventures that sound better than they’re ever likely to be.
This brings me back to those who are already in business, private merchants with shops and restaurants in this town.
In the city budget ahead, Whitewater would do well to prioritize support for those who are in private, small brick & mortar businesses, over flashy sounding but dubious tech efforts.
I’d take a shop or a restaurant over big projects, those big projects being mostly wasteful (and, for some yet in planning, harmful even to health and wellness).
Better small bricks over (supposedly) big bytes.