 |
| Search |
|
|
|
|
Development
On Monday, November 29th, James Ostrowski braved the witch of November to hold a press conference in front of Memorial Auditorium. Mr. Ostrowski questioned why elected officials chose to hold their Bass Pro press conference in the warmth and luxury of a nearby restaurant instead of inside the crumbling Aud. While the elect praised each other for spending our tax money on corporate welfare, Mr. Ostrowski figuratively smacked them upside the head. He released the following statement to the public.
Bass Pros At Corporate Welfare
James Ostrowski
President, Free Buffalo
“The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups”
Henry Hazlitt
Economics in One Lesson
Greater Buffalo is flopping about like a dying fish on the beach, wriggling around in those last violent spasms of life that paradoxically signal imminent death.
I have been taking it all in recently and it’s a sad sight. All the incumbents won on Election Day. That’s because they’ve done such a great job – for themselves and their allies and masters. They have done a terrible job for those who pay their highly inflated salaries, perks, and benefits.
Then we have this two-card monte game of the Green and Red county budgets. Giambra comes out with this “unthinkable” Red budget that slashes the county down to only what is mandated by state law. He thinks this will scare everyone into backing his insane call for increasing taxes. Then, when people call his bluff – when a grassroots movement in support of the Red budget arises – when the people say, let’s go with the Red and send a message to the corrupt slime balls in Albany – he wants no part of it and starts pushing for the Green budget – That’s your green, instead of trying to solve the fundamental problem (big government). Giambra was supposed to turn this county around. He has failed miserably.
Nor will any other current politicians do anything to turn this place around. They are all clueless. They don’t know what the problem is and so naturally they don’t have a solution. So they revert to selfish careerism, the operating principle of politics around here since the great Grover Cleveland left town. They focus on quick-fixes (one percent sales tax increase), public relations gimmicks (regionalism), and magic bullets (Bass-Pro) that will single-handedly save the day, or rather con the public into so thinking. It’s a sporting goods store, for Pete’s sake.
(By the way, has anyone told the Bass pro people – who expect to bring out-of-staters here to shop – that under the Green budget, we will soon have one of the highest sales tax rates in the country?)
We’ve seen this kind of nonsense during the entire forty-five year period of Buffalo’s decline. It allows the politicians to get re-elected enough times to reach the magic age of fifty-five, at which time they can start collecting their outrageous pensions, a reward for doing absolutely nothing good for their communities in their entire careers!
And the people accept it, tolerate it, are befuddled by it. And there’s very little hope of anything changing. I hate to say it, but leaving town does sound like the only rational move. The only thing that holds many of us here is emotional attachment to family and place.
I did what I could – I wrote a book that explains in very clear terms what’s wrong with Buffalo, who’s to blame and what the solution is. I am told I am the best-selling local author at local book stores and I did get a nice review in the Buffalo News, but I’m afraid the book has thus far had no impact on political change in Buffalo.
Which leads me to the real point of this article: to bury, for the millionth time, the notion that corporate welfare can rescue Buffalo.
The Bass Pro deal that conservative-turned-liberal George Pataki has put together will not rescue Buffalo. Any benefit from giving Bass Pro $66 million in public money or benefits will come at the expense of $66 million in losses to the taxpayers. Anyone who can’t grasp this after it is explained is, I am sorry, just plain stupid! And that includes those guys on the radio on Saturdays who have plugged this silly project form the beginning. Unless money grows on trees, that money has to be seized from taxpayers who would have spent it on their most urgent needs in voluntary free market transactions.
Nor is this a even (if felonious) transfer of wealth with Bass Pro merely ending up with wealth stolen form the taxpayer. As I explain in my book:
“The state cannot increase capital investment. Any capital that the state provides to private or public enterprises can only be derived from the prior coercive seizure of capital from a productive private entity or person. Nor is this transfer a zero sum game, since capital is transferred from a productive private entity which acquired that capital by satisfying the preferences of customers, to another entity which has not met that test but a different one: political pull. After this coercive transfer, there will be much less capital. Further, in an economy where capital is seized from sone and given to others, the producers of capital will tend to have a lower incentive to produce it in the future, and the recipients of the largesse will also have a lower incentive to produce capital in the future.”
Now at this point in the argument, meaning the point at which the argument is over as far as I’m concerned, the public relations flacks for corporate graft will trot out the usual propaganda.
“You’re against progress.”
No, I’m only against theft and stealing money from some people so that some other people – who already have more money than the victims of the theft – can get even richer. Yes, we have to do something, but we don’t have to do something stupid.
“What would you do with Memorial Auditorium?”
That’s irrelevant. The question is, can we improve the economy by stealing from some people and giving the money to others. No, we can’t. Saying “No, we can’t,” is not, contrary to your propaganda, equivalent to saying that we should let the Auditorium lie vacant forever. Under free market principles, the Auditorium would have been turned over to the private sector many years ago, and in a thriving free market economy, would have been converted to the most appropriate use consistent with the voluntarily-expressed wishes of the public.
“Bass Pro will create jobs.”
Stealing all that money from taxpayers will destroy jobs. The jobs Bass Pro will create are artificially subsidized and may well disappear without further subsidies. The record of government-subsidized jobs is atrocious. Huge amounts of money are spent per job and those jobs very often disappear later. Any questions?
So much for the theoretical argument about benefit to the economy. That’s a no-brainer, unless you value principal more than principle or your job is at stake: “Whose bread I eat, his song I must sing.”
Now, let’s look at history, you know, the record of our prior mistakes.
Here’s a list of the magic bullet projects the politicians said would turn Buffalo around but never did:
• Urban renewal
• The subway line
• The theater district
• Subsidized construction of office buildings and hotels downtown
• The baseball stadium
• The convention center
• Marine Midland Arena
• The Adelphia Project (never got off the ground)
• The Medical Campus (in the works)
The failure of these projects proves factually what I have already proven theoretically: seizing small amounts of money from hundreds of thousands of taxpayers for use in concentrated form for a politically-chosen project will always fail – except to line the pockets of the developers and politicians and their errand boys and girls.
Why then, other than naked greed and power-lust, do they deep foisting these big, bad projects upon us? Three reasons:
1. They make for great publicity for the politicians. The politicians don’t have a photo op for tax cuts – they help too many people in too many subtle and invisible ways.
2. Rich and powerful private interests are better at robbing the public purse than the average working stiff is. Will George Pataki take you call? Try it and let me know. Seriously! George Pataki, who once appointed a judge who had contributed $219,000 to various Republican causes, will take Warren Buffett’s call – to give him $102 million in “inducements” to Geico: Tax breaks, grants, and utility discounts.
3. Once you establish the absurd principle that instead of protecting private property, government should steal it from some people and give it to others for the sake of “economic development” – the problem of transaction costs guarantees that the rich and powerful will tend to get most of the benefits. Let’s say these deals cost at least $50,000 to put together. Obviously, the economic development bureaucrats – a breed of cat that would be extinct in a free society – are going to prefer big and glamorous projects to little ones ev en if the little ones are meritorious as far as they go. They are not going to spend $50,000 to give a $20,000 grant.
Buffalo Alt says Larry Quinn, errand boy wonder for the power elite for over 25 years, is backing this project. Not a good omen. He was behind a number of financially dubious projects in Buffalo’s past such as the Hyatt Hotel, the Theater District and Marine Midland Arena.
One of the problems with Buffalo is that we keep rewarding failure so lang as it hath the power to assume a pleasing shape.
The geniuses on the radio asked me – in response to my attack on Bass Pro – “How many jobs do you create?” The truth is, through my two very modest businesses, I do help employ many people around here. But only if you multiply my impact by thousands of other small business people do we add up to the alleged impact of a Bass Pro or Adelphia Project. To paraphrase Henry Hazlitt – who these geniuses should try to read sometime – the good I and the little guys do is real but invisible. Bass Pro gets all the headlines. If you take all the gunpowder in all the tiny firecrackers you can get one big boom, but the amount of energy released would not be greater than thousands of tiny booms. It would merely be more noticeable.
To sum up, the corporate welfare schemes our politicians are addicted to fail because they suck the energy out of the far corners of the market economy and concentrate that energy in one place and time, where it can do the most good for the politicians. After the press conferences are over and the consultants, lawyers, and power brokers have been richly paid off, these projects are left to face the harsh reality that they are not sustainable in the free market. Their costs exceed their revenues. Duh! That’s why they need a subsidy in the first place. The choice then is to either keep subsidizing them – stupidly sending good money after bad – or abandon them. A grim prospect but the politicians don’t give a damn because they will be long gone by then, spending our pension funds in warm weather climes to avoid our high taxes.
So far, I’ve covered the economic, political, and propaganda aspects of this corporate welfare scam. I’ve also alluded to the rank immorality of it all. It’s sheer robbery.
A further point. We really don’t know – and we may never know how this dirty deal got started. Which rich guy’s flunky had lunch with which political power broker? Is it really because Bob Rich winters next door to the owner of Bass Pro? You gotta be kidding me.
Let me now cover the legal aspects.
Corporate welfare is a violation of equal protection of the laws. It is beyond obvious that if the government taxes some businesses to give money to other businesses, it is treating those firms differently. They are not providing equal protection of the laws. Quite the contrary!
Corporate welfare is banned by the State Constitution: “The money of the state shall not be given or loaned to or in aid of any private corporation…” Art. VII. Like many states, New York got burned by past wasteful corporate welfare and pork barrel projects so we made it illegal. This hasn’t stopped anyone. After all, if you are willing to steal other people’s money, you would also be willing to flaunt the law.
Maybe it’s time for a big fat lawsuit to put a stop to this kind of nonsense. All the existing sporting goods stores in the county would make great plaintiffs. But what do I know? I just sue politicians for a living. So go ahead with this swindle. Make my day!
© Copyright 2008 by Speakupwny.com
Top of Page
|
|
|
Development
Latest Headlines
|
|
Buffalo NY Web hosting By OnLineMedia, Inc
www.olm1.com
Part of
www.onlinebuffalo.com
[where: 14206]
|