Aaron Renn’s City Journal explanation for Rhode Island’s condition has been attracting a lot of attention around here, naturally.  For the most part, it’s a succinct litany of the anecdotes and statistics that locals are apt to forget because they pile upon each other so rapidly — from the young weight-lifting firefighter on a disability pension to statistics about employment and population.

One insight that caught my eye is related to the thesis that Rhode Island has such strong natural advantages of geography, history, and culture that the people who run the government are able to exact a premium for living here:

But Rhode Island’s [early] prosperity came with a dark side: an arrogance that persists today. Like Detroit, Rhode Island enjoyed success for so long that it came to believe that it could do whatever it liked, without consequences—even when economic developments started to leave it behind. Perhaps that complacency helps explain why Rhode Island was also a leader in the more dubious areas of corruption and misrule. “It has often been said that Rhode Island has a rich political history,” former Providence mayor—and two-time convicted felon—Buddy Cianci once wrote, “which in fact is a nicer way of saying that in Rhode Island, politicians get rich.” Some say that Rhode Island’s unofficial state motto should be: “I know a guy.”

Like Bob Plain’s sneering at wealthy people during discussion of estate tax reform, the progressives and other assorted groups that cling to their self interest and their big government just assume that they can keep dictating layers of taxes and regulations without causing their targets to react.

Where Renn starts to go wrong, in my view, is with his technocratic-style solutions: “the best long-term approach may be to pursue realistic, incremental policy change that delivers modest, but substantive, improvements over time.”  A little of this pro-business policy, a little of that tax-the-rich, a little of the other targeted tax breaks.

Renn dismisses the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity as “some locals” who are “pushing to eliminate or reduce the sales tax,” but he misses the big reasons to take on that particular tax.  It isn’t about our ranking versus other states.  It’s about our particular location and geography.  More importantly, thought, it’s about addressing this point, with which Renn starts to get back on track at the end:

For anything serious to change, though, Rhode Islanders themselves must first understand the need for reform, and that will likely require something that’s been missing: political leadership.

I say “starts to get back on track” because the idea that political leadership can precede the community’s desire for change is still in the technocratic rut.  That is, it follows the principle that a political leader can put together the right collection of policies, benefiting the right groups of Rhode Islanders, most likely following the advice of experts like Renn, and push the people onto that course.

Considering that he traces the seeds of Rhode Island’s undoing back centuries, Renn should realize that if the people are going to change so dramatically, small, incremental fixes won’t do.  They’re too easy to transform into sops to special interests, and their effects are too easy for the likes of Tom Sgouros to spin as detriments.