At 10:03 AM 5/10/03 -0700, Tim May wrote: [Talking about government-assisted projects and businesses going broke]
Which is all evolution in action, except that government should not be in the construction and business development business. (I would go further and say that nothing in the U.S. Constitution, which states and localities are bound by, justifies taking money from citizens to give to businesses. No matter "how smart an investment" it looks to be. Ditto for governments running gambling operations, but I digress.)
It's very clear that this is bad policy, though I'm not too sure it's actually unconstitutional. Didn't the states finance and run some of the early canals? The big problem is that the state has to have all kinds of coercive powers to do its main jobs, and those powers are awfully handy when the state is trying to protect its state-run businesses from competition, or buy land for its favored new project that the owner doesn't really want to sell, or whatever. A secondary problem is that there's no limit to how much the business can lose, when it simply can't go broke because the state owns and protects it. Just look at AMTRAK. (And as many of us have learned to our cost in the last few years, there's almost no limit other than bankruptcy to how quickly a badly-run business can lose money.)
According to news reports on this area, Sunnyvale is still losing money on a major indoor mall it built 23-4 years ago ("Sunnyvale Town Center," which I used to live a mile or so away from when it was being built in the late 70s.
IMO, there's something very, very wrong about any level of government building shopping malls.
Yep. Though I think it's a lot more common that a private company builds and operates the shopping malls, but with special incentives given to the company by the government. This is basically patronage, and it's always been a big part of local politics. How does that Huey Long quote go? Something like "Those who give a lot will get a large slice of the pie; those who give a little will get a small slice of the pie, and those who give nothing will get...good government." And of course, you get interesting competition between local governments, with each offering a bigger bag of goodies paid for by the taxpayers, or seized by condemning someone's property, so that the big mall built two years ago goes bankrupt because of the newer, shinier, even more subsidized mall that's just been built a few miles away. The same sort of competition happens for factories. I'm not usually a "there oughta be a law" kind of person, but in this case, a well-thought-out federal law prohibiting this kind of competition would be a major net benefit to taxpayers and local governments throughout the country.
--Tim May
--John Kelsey, kelsey.j@ix.netcom.com PGP: FA48 3237 9AD5 30AC EEDD BBC8 2A80 6948 4CAA F259