I posted yesterday about Whitewater’s Innovation Center, in a post entitled, Whitewater’s Innovation Center: Grants and Bonds.
The more one looks at the project, the emptier it seems. Attempts to justify the multi-million dollar public expenditure — on their own, apart from any other consideration — are exercises in embarrassing hyperbole. Attempts to answer objections to the project are particularly absurd, and only highlight how weak is the case in its favor.
There’s a greater problem than the project’s emptiness — it’s the inability to see clearly the city in which the project is taking so much time and money. Whitewater, Wisconsin, now population 14,454, is a struggling rural town, with large numbers of poor children.
Although I am a critic of much public spending, when I think of a model of public spending that at least properly considered actual conditions, I often think of Franklin Roosevelt. (For a critique of Roosevelt’s New Deal, one should consider Amity Shlaes’s excellent Forgotten Man.)
Much is made of Roosevelt’s sunny temperament, but that’s not why he’s admirable. He’s admirable because no matter how dubious Roosevelt’s spending (to my mind), he and his administration never lost sight of common and poor people. His efforts to control utilities were misguided, for example, but they had a clear and admirable aim: to provide electrification for common people. Roosevelt cared for the condition of ordinary Americans.
The contrast with current city projects, ones that Whitewater has backed over the last decade, is astonishing. When one looks at a project like the Whitewater Innovation Center, it’s of utterly no value to the many poor people in our small city. Not only does it have no chance to achieve the stated goal of the funding — it also has no chance of addressing the actual and difficult conditions that real people in our real town face.
No chance at all.
If Roosevelt’s committed and serious team were to see projects like the Innovation Center, I think they’d be astounded at how unsuited it is to the problems our town faces. This project offers no balm to prior economic or natural calamity. Looking around at poverty, unemployment, and economic uncertainty, the New Dealers would have been more far more practical, and (I think) outraged at this kind of spending.
One may hear that, since the money was offered (more, in fact, than our city administration asked), we should take what we can, because otherwise someone else would.
It was selfish to take money better suited to more realistic projects, merely because we could. Much of America’s fiscal predicament begins with states and local governments taking whatever they can, and figuring out what to make of it later. (Funds unused would not be lost to America, but could be reallocated to other initiatives more suited to these difficult times.)
That is, though, a fiscal problem. The greater problem is one of principled leadership — that men should not take for themselves what would (in other places) help other people, more fittingly and truly.