Companies Can’t Deny the Math of Employment
Target’s experience with a too-high minimum wage illustrates in clear lines why government policy can’t simply assert economic fantasies as reality.
Annette Lloyd: Crushed Freedom Inspires Another Escape Plan
Rhode Island’s ban on flavored vaping shows a mentality that Rhode Islanders increasingly want to escape.
I’m constantly confused by politicians who think that their election also comes with honorary degrees in medicine, education, commerce, and the like… that upon their election, they have a right to appoint themselves as doctor, teacher, etc., to their constituents. Most of our elected officials are purely bought and sold tools of one lobby or another. They know no more than you or me.
Informed adults don’t need this kind of micro-supervision. Vaping has allowed me to get away from cigarettes, and I imagine the hundreds of thousands or millions of vapers in New England resent having their legal sources of vaping suddenly cut off with no compelling research into the public health effects of the habit.
This ban is a terrible trend by our governor. What she isn’t considering are the local small businesses she is destroying. There are plenty of online sources (for now) which will take more money out of RI. And, even more crucially, those who use vaping as a safer alternative to smoking will be forced to return to tobacco products. Maybe Governor Raimondo has missed the tax dollars from each pack of cigarettes purchased in RI.
The messages she is sending, of government overreach and a total lack of consideration of the ramifications of her edict, are yet another nail in this beautiful state’s casket. The R and I are, increasingly, standing for Really Idiotic.
Once our son is done with high school and Boy Scouts, we are fleeing. In search of freedom and some self-respect.
Addressing the Toll of the First-Responding Job
When considering suicides among first responders, we should consider whether they used to get the help they needed without asking, in the form of cultural stability.
Correcting Higher Education as a Funding Mechanism for Nonsense
If URI’s anti-Brady professor were expressing the ideological opposite views, we know how the school would be reacting, so maybe it should flip the script.
Freedom… From the Progressive Point of View
Perhaps the most clarifying statement in Rhode Island politics, recently, came from one of the candidates now involved with Matt Brown’s Political Cooperative (which, despite the name, is not an alt-country band):
“Thought I may be the epitome of the American dream I cannot sit around and watch while many of my brothers and sisters are denied a shot at that very dream,″ said Jonathan Acosta, tracing his own story from “first generation American born to undocumented migrants from Colombia″ to the Ivy League.
“I believe that we are not free until we have dismantled structural inequality, developed sustainable clean energy, enacted a $15 minimum wage that pays equal pay for equal work, extended healthcare for all, provide[d] affordable housing, ensured quality public education starting at Pre-K, undergone campaign finance reform, criminal justice reform, and implemented sensible gun control,″ said Acosta, running for the Senate seat currently held by Elizabeth Crowley, D-Central Falls.
So, to Mr. Acosta, we’re not free until we’ve taken from some categories of people to give to others, limited people’s energy options to benefit fashionable technologies, forbidden employers and employees from setting a mutually agreeable value on work to be done, taken money from some people in order to pay for others’ health care (as defined by a vote-buying government) and/or put price controls on what providers can charge, placed restrictions on who can live where and what they can build, tightened the regulation of politics with limits on the donations and privacy of those who become politically active, and reduced the rights guaranteed under the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution.
If that doesn’t match your understanding of “freedom,” you’re not alone. Indeed, by its mission, this “cooperative” is cooperating against anybody whose understanding of freedom differs, because it cannot possibly cooperate with anybody who disagrees. You simply can’t hold a definition of freedom that doesn’t have satisfactory outcomes for the interest groups that progressives have targeted.
Where Might an Objective Morality Come From?
The essay to which Isaac Whitney linked this morning comes right up to a question that is almost so obviously right at the center of questions about morality that nobody ever asks it: If people are coming to their own conclusions about morality, where are they coming from?
Writes Isaac:
In one of my favorite quotes, Thomas Sowell says, “…each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late” (162). If, God forbid, the death of freedom should arrive, its death will be a result of our refusal to civilize these little barbarians. Our downfall will begin with our fear of infringing upon their personal autonomy, and our playing into the individualistic American gospel that says we must be free to choose our own path, find our own morality, and speak our own truth.
If everyone were rational, you’d expect this notion of radical autonomy to overlap with small-government and religious perspectives. One oddity is that those who most vociferously proclaim that society has no right to impose a moral code also tend to emphasize the use of our most compulsory institution — government — to solve problems and disputes. Another oddity is that you would expect people who trust in our ability to discern morality would also believe that there must be some form of deity dispensing it. The opposite seems to be the case.
Of course, people don’t tend to be rational, especially in these areas of thought. We tend to come to the conclusions that we want to be correct and then fit arguments to that image.
Consequently, as Isaac suggests, we risk coming un-moored. Whereas conservatives would suggest that God defines an objective morality toward which we should guide each other by the least coercive means feasible, radicals object to any coercion at all (except where they want it to be total) on the grounds that there is no objective standard (except the one they trust us all to follow).
The Autonomous Individual Versus Institutions
Looking for ways to create the new and improved you? This mindset can be harmful to society.
Freedom, liberty, and individuality are great things, but a society that considers them to be the ultimate things is bound to lose them. The art of subjectively finding one’s own truth without outside influence may sound attractive on the surface but will ultimately lead to destructive ends.
I explore this theme and ways to combat it in a blog post titled “The Surprising Roots of Liberty.”
Making Things Better After 9/11
Eighteen years used to be the age of maturity, and the 18th anniversary of 9/11 raises the question of whether it still is.
The Divisiveness of Revisionist Tolerance
Staring back into the past to determine who owes whom what material debt destroys our sense of being one people with inherent obligations to each other.
Casinos and Government Non-Competitiveness
As more casinos open their doors in Massachusetts, Rhode Islanders are at least presented with an important lesson in government.
Insider Senator Frank Ciccone (D, North Providence, Providence) has demanded to know “How can we compete?” The answer, in short, is to stop requiring an act of the General Assembly for Twin River to do so.
Rhode Island takes a high percentage of gambling revenue, reducing the incentive for private investors to be involved. The state dictates details about how many of what games from what company should be on the premises, and the governor is even now seeking to lock in a restrictive contract with IGT for 20 whole years. Read through the state’s laws pertaining the the casinos, and it is clear that Twin River is little more than a management company for a state-run casino.
How can we compete? Change that around.
Steve Frias notes that Rhode Island has already been down this path with horse racing, writing that it declined and disappeared for three reason:
First, competition from horse race tracks located in other New England states caused Rhode Island horse race tracks to lose customers. …
Second, the number of horse racing gamblers shrank as the sport failed to attract younger fans. …
Third, the quality of Rhode Island horse racing became poor due in part to a high tax burden. Rhode Island politicians steadily increased the state’s share of horse racing revenues from 3.5 percent in 1934 to 9 percent by 1971. This caused race track owners to invest less money into their facilities and it reduced the quality of the horses they could attract for races since the prize money was smaller. By 1976, Rhode Island race tracks were being called “the most miserable race tracks in America” with “the most miserable horses in America.” In 1978, horse racing in Rhode Island came to an end.
This is a microcosm of the way Rhode Island operates. Simply put, you can’t compete when you have to cut a state’s worth of insiders in on the deal. As life becomes less and less dependent on where you live, the captive audience will shrink, and business (any kind of business) will shift to the best competitor.
Thus, mobile sports betting (or wind turbine production or whatever) is no answer for the long term. Even if Rhode Island is first to market, we’ll never be able to compete until we change the way the state runs.
The Elusive Lesson for the Angry Progressive
Sometimes a reader can’t help but feel like a professor watching a student come so close to an epiphany only to talk right past it. One such moment can be found in this paragraph from an essay on UpRise RI by Missak Melkonian, about the JUMP bike gang that roved Providence for a day (emphasis added):
Maybe the youths terrorizing the yuppies have a point. I would be, and hell, I AM pissed that hotels and lofts can go up in the blink of an eye but repairing public schools is tantamount to rewriting the Constitution! If those in power wanted to fix the conditions that create these “issues” amongst the youth, they could do it, but they won’t and never will because their bottom line will always be money and power. I grew up in Providence schools. I didn’t need a report from Johns Hopkins to tell me the schools are awful. Anyone with common sense could tell you that – racist teachers, dilapidated facilities, extremely punitive disciplinary policies, do-gooder white savior NGO’s – not to mention the status of the recreation centers in Providence or the various boys and girls clubs. These all make for a ripe combination of anger, resentment, and antipathy in the youth. It’s hard to care about the well-being of something like a JUMP bike when it’s so evident the world doesn’t give a sh*t about you, or even consider you a human being.
Hmmm… what quality applies to hotels and lofts that does not apply to public school? Ceding a little ideological ground, one could note that the for-profit incentives of the private sector align the drive for “money and power” with the good being sought. Moreover, the need to draw resources through the consensual commerce of customers translates into incentive to treat them as human beings, without bias or unduly “punitive disciplinary policies.”
A failure to spot this lesson will lead to one place only: a tacit desire to squash the productive private sector so that it does not outshine the under-performing public sector, thus increasing the amount of resentment in the world.
A Thoroughly Predictable Chain of Events at the Wyatt Detention Center
In response to the events at the Wyatt Detention Center from two weeks ago, Our society could choose to accept anarchy, to accept that whoever has the bigger, tougher, better organized gang wins for themselves the use of public spaces; literally implementing might makes right as a governing principle. This does not seem to be a pathway that governing authorities in Rhode Island will consciously choose, as state government quickly remembered the importance of deterring violence from escalating, once the focus of events became people not involved in the intentional blocking of traffic.
A second possibility would be to cut the problem off at its root: enforcing laws and norms against blocking traffic and against denying people the right to travel in public spaces, and uniting around a shared norm that has served our society well. (I concede that that last phrase is a bit normative).
Of course, this depends on the right to travel being a norm that is widely shared. Is this still the case? The affinity repeatedly shown by protestors for blocking traffic, combined with the so-far one-sided response by Rhode Island authorities, suggests that it may not be; this, in turn, points in the direction of the third possible evolution of the system: convincing people that it is acceptable for government to protect fundamental rights within the context of a caste system, where some people have fewer rights than others. For various reasons, this is an unlikely candidate for smooth implementation.
That is your universe of choices. In the end, any way forward that abandons the impartial defense of the right to travel will lead to more and more cycles of violent conflict that will only be eliminated once the norm acting against those who try to block innocent people from traveling in public spaces is rediscovered.
A Disabled Society in an Abled Social Body
The headline of Ashley Taylor’s JSTOR Daily essay doesn’t so much articulate the problem as illustrate it: “The Complicated Issue of Transableism.”
In the late 1990s, the Scottish surgeon Robert Smith performed elective, above-the-knee amputations on two people. (The hospital he was affiliated with eventually compelled him to stop.) Smith’s patients are just two examples of people who have body integrity identity dysphoria, also known as being transabled: They feel they are disabled people trapped in abled bodies. Some people feel that they are meant to be amputees and will even injure themselves in order to create the desired amputation or make it medically necessary for a surgeon to perform it. Other people feel that they were meant to be blind or deaf.
A healthy society would not find “transableism” complicated at all. It is an indication of deep mental illness, and it should be treated, not indulged. To the extent our society cannot articulate this unambiguously, we are clearly falling into social illness.
At the very core of this question is a denial of our right as a community to hold Platonic ideals — not to mention the necessity and even inevitability of doing so. Being able-bodied is the objective norm, the ideal. When people are disabled, we make allowances and provisions for them in order to close the gap to that ideal. It is therefore objectively wrong to expect society to offer those accommodations to somebody who deliberately moves away from the ideal.
Somebody of an opposing view might turn this argument around and suggest that all they’re doing is accommodating the person’s psychological distance from the ideal of feeling like an able-bodied person. But making permanent physical changes compounds the distance rather than relieving it: the person is now disabled and still averse to being able-bodied.
The best one could say is that the person is closer to the ideal of being comfortable, but that is potentially fleeting. After all, it is always possible to be more disabled.
Elevating the ideal of individual comfort is also destructive of the possibility of objective norms. On the social scale, such principles have to be taken as simply true, else the utility of culture evaporates and society simply falls apart.
A Problem of Basic Operations in Local Government
The problem of getting rid of “terrible teachers” points to a problem with the incentives of government when it is used to accomplish anything that isn’t straightforward and critical.
A Challenge to Whitehouse’s Banana-Republic Legal Principles
Senator Whitehouse’s attack on the Supreme Court shows his cynicism and malleable legal principles.
The Best Way to Ensure a Long-Term Morality
My post this morning, about the incentive for those who rely on Minnesota trees to ensure the long-term health of Minnesota forests, came right up to the edge of a much bigger topic. The most-important factor guarding humanity against the tragedy of the commons — wherein individuals use up natural resources because the incentive to preserve never outweighs the incentive to profit for any one person — is that the human beings involved think forward to the future beyond their own personal needs and desires.
As I wrote earlier, we can expect people not to poison their own well, so to speak, by destroying the resources on which they rely, but only within a certain range. If the activity (like cutting down trees) is relatively difficult and the people able or willing to do it are relatively few, it is more likely they’ll collectively recognize their long-term incentives. If something is easy to do and many people are doing it, then it is less likely that they’ll delay immediate profit for longer-term stability, because somebody else can come along and edge in.
Obviously, it also matters how far into the future the players are looking. If people are desperate to have a meal today, they’ll be more careless about the resources. The selfish, childless businessman of progressive fantasy need only preserve the resource to the extent that he can capitalize on it.
This is where the topic expands. A business owner who sees him or her self as building a multi-generational source of income will worry about critical resources indefinitely into the future.
That principle extrapolates beyond businesses, too. People who are thinking about their own children and their children’s children have a living, breathing reason to figure the future into everything they do. That is, making families and children central to personal and cultural meaning has philosophical benefits for the entire society.
This realization points an interesting light at secular progressivism, which is fundamentally anti-family in its philosophy. When progressives find it necessary to appeal to a long-term perspective for their political advocacy, as with the environment, they have to resort either to abstractions (the good of humankind) or to a religious elevation of something else (like the planet) as an object of concern in its own right.
Neither alternative can compete with the incentives that come from love of one’s children.
Political Rorschach in the Wyatt Protest
If we were inclined to pause and review video of incidents with an eye toward understanding why each person is doing what he or she is doing, maybe we could reduce the level of conflict in our society, but where’s the profit in that?
Looking to the Data on Gun Control
Leah Libresco’s Washington Post commentary on gun control is worth a read, not only for information on that specific issue, but also for some perspective on how political issues should be considered:
By the time we published our project, I didn’t believe in many of the interventions I’d heard politicians tout. I was still anti-gun, at least from the point of view of most gun owners, and I don’t want a gun in my home, as I think the risk outweighs the benefits. But I can’t endorse policies whose only selling point is that gun owners hate them. Policies that often seem as if they were drafted by people who have encountered guns only as a figure in a briefing book or an image on the news.
Instead, I found the most hope in more narrowly tailored interventions. Potential suicide victims, women menaced by their abusive partners and kids swept up in street vendettas are all in danger from guns, but they each require different protections.
One often gets the impression that the motivation for gun laws really is an assertion of power over the types of people who own them. Another motivation often seems to be a personal sense of having done something about some tragic event by passing new laws, which shouldn’t outweigh the rights of others.
The key quality of Libresco’s thinking is that she apparently began by asking what her objective was and then measuring possible solutions. Following her lead would also allow us to weigh one objective against another.
For example, among the policies that she suggests is “identify[ing] gang members for intervention based on previous arrests and weapons seizures” using “an algorithm.” This brings to mind the Community Safety Act in Providence, which places extreme limits on the lists that law enforcement can use to track gang activity. If reducing gun violence is a critical goal, then a policy like the CSA would have a different context.
Maybe one policy wins out over another, or maybe neither makes sense, but if our public policy debates were more logically structured and more rationally conducted, at least we would be weighing pluses and minuses. Instead, it too often seems that the arguments proceed with participants feeling that the problems and solutions are obvious and easily resolved if not for the intransigence of the other side.
A Corporatist Partnership to Solidify a Top-Down Society in RI
A new form of government appears to be taking shape in Rhode Island before our very eyes.
Field Trips in a Government Monopoly
When an institution like education is essentially under a government monopoly, changes in public sentiment can have ridiculous consequences, like the cancellation of all field trips in Cumberland.
Love and Dignity in Political Discourse
Perhaps the major cultural challenge we have to overcome for political discourse is to change our tone of contempt for one of sincere interest and assumed dignity.
A Culture of Pay to Play
Yesterday, I suggested that IGT’s $150,000 donation to the Democratic Governor’s Association (DGA) looks kind of quid-pro-quo-ish, given that the organization’s chairwoman is Gina Raimondo, who was at the time preparing a long-term, no-bid contract for the country in her role as Rhode Island’s governor. WPRI’s Eli Sherman now reports that this instance was actually part of a much more pervasive culture of pay to play:
IGT and Twin River Worldwide Holdings – the state’s leading gambling companies – contributed $150,000 and $100,000 to the DGA through the first half of the year, respectively. The national organization announced Wednesday it raised a record-breaking $19 million during the same period. …
… IRS records show IGT on average has contributed $159,285 each year since 2013, including $175,000 last year and $160,000 in 2017.
For Twin River, the $100,000 it contributed this year marks the first time in at least the last five years the company has given money to the DGA, according to a company spokesperson.
This inevitable mixture of politics and profit is important to keep in mind whenever government gets involved in a line of business, as it is with gambling. The development of a pay-to-play environment becomes absolutely critical to remember when allowing a state to do as Rhode Island has been doing — involving itself deeply in economic development. The more central government is in the economy, the more campaign donations increase in importance and the less relevant business viability or the health of the economy becomes.
RI Has Been Following the Wrong Approach to Economic Development
GoLocalProv recently published an essay of mine laying out the errors of the central-planning approach to economic development and suggesting an alternative:
In [Bryant University Professor of Economics Edinaldo Tebaldi’s] vision, policymakers (like the governor and legislature) advised by experts (like economics professors) stand before the complex machine of our economy and turn dials as they seek the optimum operation. …
An alternative vision would treat Rhode Island’s economy more as a landscape in which valuable fruits cannot grow because opportunistic weeds are draining the substance of the soil and blocking out the sun. The people who live here have roots and should not be forced to tear them out, but government makes it too difficult for them to flourish, so they wither instead. In this view, the Ocean State and its residents already have everything they need to innovate and advance the economy, and anything that’s missing, they can figure out and procure. They just need space and freedom.
Providence Schools and the Greatest Transparency
The state education board should have prepared for a larger audience to observe its meeting about Providence schools, but its failure to anticipate the need is partly the blame of Rhode Islanders, who rarely attend such meetings.
Education to Build Sturdier Bubbles
As Glenn Reynolds suggests, news like this isn’t exactly “startling”:
In a surprising new national survey, members of each major American political party were asked what they imagined to be the beliefs held by members of the other. The survey asked Democrats: “How many Republicans believe that racism is still a problem in America today?” Democrats guessed 50%. It’s actually 79%. The survey asked Republicans how many Democrats believe “most police are bad people”. Republicans estimated half; it’s really 15%. …
… But what’s startling is the further finding that higher education does not improve a person’s perceptions – and sometimes even hurts it. In their survey answers, highly educated Republicans were no more accurate in their ideas about Democratic opinion than poorly educated Republicans. For Democrats, the education effect was even worse: the more educated a Democrat is, according to the study, the less he or she understands the Republican worldview.
Democrats without high school diplomas are three times more likely to understand members of the opposing party than Democrats with PhDs. That may not actually be that surprising, but one odd finding is that ignorance of the opposition’s beliefs increases as people become more politically engaged.
Of course, we should layer on the caveats. The questions by which the study collected its data deserve scrutiny, and there could be all sorts of distinctions that might correlate with party affiliation and/or education, such that neither is really a cause of the effect.
That said, the study makes intuitive sense that corresponds with conservatives’ interpretation of modern political dynamics. Working class Democrats are more likely to be conservative, which would give them more sympathy with Republicans; if you hold a particular political view, for example, you’ll be able to see that it isn’t implicitly racist. Moreover, at lower levels, occupations are less likely to be a matter of choice, so perhaps those who hold them are more likely to be thrown together with people in similar circumstances who have different political affiliations.
At the same time, education has shifted toward indoctrination, which means that it teaches and prioritizes judgment, not understanding. This, in turn, changes the nature of political engagement, as being politically active shifts away from an emphasis on addressing real problems and toward the dominance of an ideology.
Reading a Free Market Solution Between the Lines
Three items in this week’s Nesi’s Notes point to the conclusion that RI’s top-down economic development approach isn’t working and can’t work here.
A Need for Courage on the Right
Princeton Professor Robert George offered important advice at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver: We need to display conspicuous courage. This explanation is important to keep in mind:
George acknowledged it is not easy to suffer such “abuse” and “defamation,” noting it places jobs, relationships, businesses and much more in jeopardy. But the more people stay silent, the bigger a problem it becomes, he said.
“If we want our children, if we want our young men and women, to be able to stand up on a college campus and not be bowled and not be intimidated, and to speak the truth and to speak their minds — we had better set an example in our own adult lives,” George said, prompting applause.
“Anyone who succumbs to the intimidation and bullying, anyone who acquiesces or goes silent out of fear, not only harms his or her own character … he or she also makes things harder for others,” George said. “We owe it not only to ourselves to be courageous … we owe it to God.”
In cultural matters — as well as spiritual — we’re all part of a chain. Each person who steps back from the challenge makes it that much more difficult for the next person in line. The ideal state of a movement is for its members to be so uniformly sturdy that is difficult for the weakest to break ranks. On the other end of deterioration, even the strongest find it difficult to be sturdy.
One can observe this in play as an ideological strategy when even the most reasonable progressives refuse to acknowledge that a conservative is making a reasonable point. In such cases, reasonableness is a sign of weakness (in actuality betraying the weakness of the position that the progressives are defending).
That is not a model that conservatives should emulate, because it is morally wrong and intellectually vapid, but it merits remembering: Whenever you feel yourself wavering in the face of hostility, bring to mind those next in line who will find it more difficult to uphold your shared principles because you backed down.
Assessing the Problems and the Solutions of the Town
The particulars will vary from town to town — depending on the makeup of the population, the availability of non-tax revenue, the personalities involved in local politics, and so on — but key principles are essential for government to operate. In a representative democracy with frequent turnover of elected officials, the rules have to be clear and consistent (and the power limited), such that the electorate is voting on broad questions of direction, not to address immediate crises or controversies.
As vice president of the Tiverton Town Council, I’ve been giving these matters a great deal of thought, and it has ultimately come down to this assessment of problems and solutions:
- Tiverton has no long-term financial plan. Beginning at the council level and with input and cooperation across town government — municipal and schools — we must put every known challenge on the table and piece them all together so we can make rational decisions going forward. Everything is a trade-off with something else, and without a real and concrete understanding of what needs to be done by when, town government cannot make informed decisions.
- The roles of town officials are not clearly defined (at least in how they are executed). Much of our difficulty maintaining employees in critical positions as well as our political acrimony comes from the same source. Whether we’re talking micromanagement from the Town Council, decisions by employees that follow improper channels, or boards that claim power for themselves (or neglect it), lacking a clear picture of who is responsible for what can result in conflicts and wasted effort.
- Basic and consistent rules of operation haven’t been followed. A clear message from local businesses when Town Council members, town officials, and various volunteers toured their facilities a couple months ago was that the rules they have to follow change depending whom they ask or who holds a particular office at the time. Meanwhile, every time employees have done something so egregious as to deserve to lose their jobs, lawyers advising the town have pointed out that no prior violations were ever actually put in their files. At the same time, the Board of Canvassers has picked and chosen what it would put on ballots. These examples all illustrate the importance of consistency.
Some of these challenges will sound familiar across Rhode Island, but talking to people involved in politics in some other towns, I’ve been struck by just how out-of-whack Tiverton is on some of them. That is particularly true when it comes to the lack of a financial plan.
Bruce and the Incentives of the Central Planner
Here’s a telling note from Ted Nesi’s Nesi’s Notes on WPRI.com:
The CNBC list drew a lot of attention on social media, including from economic-development expert Bruce Katz, who tweeted: “I find this ranking difficult to understand given large drop in RI unemployment, investments in infrastructure, off-shore wind, innovation vouchers + innovation campuses, attraction of Infosys and other significant companies and many other smart moves.” Turns out Katz had good reason to have Rhode Island on the mind: on Wednesday night I ran into him in Providence, and discovered he was in town to interview with Commerce RI about writing its new economic development study. Katz, of course, helped put together the 2015 Brookings Institution report that provided the blueprint for the Raimondo administration on economic development. Katz has since left Brookings, and now runs a consultancy called New Localism Advisers. The other three contenders are Camoin Associates, TIP Strategies, and The Research Associates. Commerce spokesperson Matt Sheaff says there’s no timeline yet for making a pick.
How perfect is this. A guy who was at the center of RI’s failed economic development strategy is publicly praising the state’s economy four or five years later while also secretly in the running for a big contract from the state government.
The archetypal central planner would no doubt disagree with this assessment, but a skeptical observer might see in the above blockquote a reason to doubt central planning. Even by their own philosophies central planners aren’t demigods who should be expected to get every decision right from the start, which means they have to be able and willing to review their results with a cold, clinical eye. The political incentives and human nature, however, make that practice virtually impossible.
A Fundamental Puzzle of Civic Engagement RI Needs to Solve
Rhode Island politics at the local level are kneading reformers out of the dough of the status quo, and we won’t have the tools we need when crisis hits.
