Yesterday, the state’s major daily reported that cable-Internet-phone provider Cox Communications would be closing down its Rhode Island call center, transferring 234 jobs out of state.  The same day, Rhode Island Representative Raymond Hull (D, Providence, North Providence) responded with legislation that would require “public utilities,” defined to include services like those that Cox provide, must maintain “customer service operation[s]” physically within the state.

The inclination of legislators to micromanage businesses and lives is bad enough.  Who is Representative Hull to know how Cox’s customers can be “well served”?  If they’re not, that will create a market opportunity for somebody else, and the company will fail; it’s not as if there aren’t other options.

It compounds the assault on the state’s freedoms and economy that legislation appears to be entirely a reaction to a specific decision by a company operating within the state.  That sort of governing philosophy — which is by no means unique to Hull — is itself a sign to people who want to begin or grow businesses that Rhode Island is not a safe place to do so.

It would be difficult to overstate the harm that legislators have done to Rhode Island by behaving as if it is government’s role not just to manage activities within its legitimate scope, but to manage our entire society.

According to the Providence Journal, the locations in which Cox is consolidating its call centers are in Oklahoma, Kansas, Virginia, Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada, and Arizona.  In December (prior to the revision to be released later today), their respective unemployment rates were 5.4%, 4.9%, 5.2%, 5.7%, 3.6%, 8.8%, and 7.6%, compared with Rhode Island’s pre-revision 9.1%. With the exception of the last two, they’re all well below the national average of 6.6%.

Moreover, every single one of them is a right to work state.  That means that, even if its employees decide to unionize, the company can still employ and hire people who don’t want to join the union.

Rhode Island’s government has gotten itself into a terrible cycle, in which the government imposes restrictions and taxes that narrow the number of companies that are willing and able to participate in a particular market.  As individual companies take larger pieces of the pie, the government is better able, and feels more justified, to tell them how they must operate.  Then, when the anti-growth, anti-freedom policies that they’ve imposed produce their predictable rotten fruit, they try to legislate the consequences, as if a hasty statute can dispel the realities of economics.

The energy market is another example.  The state repeatedly imposes restrictions, like renewable energy standards, that create unnecessary costs that companies must pass on to customers.  Then, as with legislation introduced this year, legislators presume to tell those companies how much they can increase their rates.

The money for the legislators’ previous experiments in central management of our society has to come from somewhere, and as the business environment becomes too hostile, it ultimately comes from people who don’t find jobs or who can’t find or afford services that they need and want.

Businesses won’t bother to come here, and Rhode Islanders won’t bother to start them, if we’re the sort of people willing to repeatedly elect people with this mindset, often with no competition, and almost with no votes.  (It’s almost poetic that the union president just elected to the legislature from Woonsocket was able to win the election with exactly the same number of votes as jobs that Cox is eliminating in Rhode Island.

A state in which it is a constant threat that the government will step into your business to make decisions, without any concept of the correct bounds for government or respect for the rule of law, and where there is no observable chance that people who disagree with that philosophy can gain electoral ground, is not a safe place in which to invest one’s time and resources.