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As of the most recent update to this post, over 50 Rhode Islanders have signed the petition calling on state policymakers to adopt energy policies that will provide for affordable and abundant energy supplies for the residents of our state … instead of ‘net zero’ policies that will drive electricity prices and energy costs to staggering and unaffordable levels. Check back regularly for updated commentary.
PUBLISHER’s NOTE: In yet another example of how policymakers failed to conduct any level of appropriate cost-vs-benefit analysis when they set our state upon a “net zero” strategy and passed RI’s “Act On Climate” in 2021, it has now come to light that there has been zero planning for the payment and disposal of wind […]
Lawrence Gillheeney of the Rhode Island Center for Freedom & Prosperity was inducted into the 1995 Society during America’s Future’s Northeast Regional Showcase & Polo Match this weekend. The 1995 Society honors young leaders whose bold impact advances freedom in their communities. Since its founding, it has recognized the best, brightest, and bravest rising stars in the liberty movement.
Agents patrolling the Canadian border continue to apprehend illegal foreign nationals entering the US.
The RI House Education Committee will hear H5498 on Wednesday, March 22. In 2019, the Rhode Island General Assembly granted authority to the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) to develop curricula for various subjects and mandate it to every school district in the state … removing authority from local school districts to determine what […]
The RI Center for Center for Freedom & Prosperity, earlier this month signed a national coalition letter urging Congress to oppose a federal attack on citizens’ 401(k) pension savings. The letter opposed Biden’s Department of Labor rules that would allow environmental extremists to divert hundreds of billions of dollars of Americans’ pension savings into green […]
Hadley Arkes, a longtime commentator on abortion, natural law, and constitutional jurisprudence, joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the arguments that should be made to defend unborn human life in America. Arkes notes that the term “value judgment … is a term that we began to use with Nietzsche. When people lost their confidence […]
In 2015, I presented Lawrence, Massachusetts, as a cautionary tale of the government-plantation economic model. Just as industrialists once attempted to draw in foreign labor to the “company town” because it was less expensive, the local government is turning the city into a “government town,” whose main source of income is transfer payments from outside to pay for government services.
Consequently, this recent Boston Globe article caught my eye:
The federal government’s relentless assault on the feared MS-13 street gang in Greater Boston continued this week, with two members of the violent outfit admitting to their roles in the 2015 slaying of a 16-year-old boy in Lawrence, authorities said.
True, immigrant gangs are nothing new to the United States, and homegrown gangs certainly exist. Still, tracing the arrival of an international criminal enterprise is a necessary task, and one needn’t indulge too much in speculation to propose that using immigration to bolster the population in need of government services leaves a region vulnerable to this sort of invasion.
Radical individualism, young conservatives’ political naivete, brain coupling, and disease in the social media city.
Over 250 emails sent to lawmakers from constituents yesterday in opposition to H7150. An incredible number for just one day. (100 in the first hour alone!) The progressive agenda can be resisted. BIG THANK YOU to the coalition. #RIProgressiveBadBill
— Lawrence Gillheeney (@LGillheeney) February 13, 2018
Talk about an America that is great again!!!! 🇺🇸@NewportLost https://t.co/zhCWUXhJhI
— Lawrence Gillheeney (@LGillheeney) January 6, 2018
Really interesting story on AirBnB…. HOWEVER, why the heck should they be licensed?!?! The government shouldn’t have anything to do with this, they can never keep up with the speed of new technology! https://t.co/UsBi4pa3PL
— Lawrence Gillheeney (@LGillheeney) November 17, 2017
In imposing transgender “guidance” on school districts, Rhode Island government proves contempt for the First Amendment.
We need to work out the gray line at which a girlfriend “goading” her boyfriend to suicide can be an act of incitement (with a nod toward the GOP-baseball assassin).
Ted Nesi reports (if I may paraphrase) that Rhode Island cities have been crawling over each other to slurp from the sluice some money from the Boston Federal Reserve:
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston President and CEO Eric Rosengren visited Rhode Island on Thursday to award $400,000 grants to three local cities through the bank’s Working Cities Challenge.
The program aims to promote collaboration between local leaders to address socioeconomic challenges. The three Rhode Island winners are Providence, Cranston and Newport. Eight other cities submitted applications but did not win grants, which are funded by public and private contributions, not the Fed. …
Appearing on this week’s Executive Suite, Rosengren said the four-year-old program grew out of research conducted by the Boston Fed that showed efforts to tackle cities’ challenges worked best when leaders from different groups worked together toward a common goal.
Readers may recall that the Boston Fed’s involvement with Lawrence, Massachusetts, under a project in the same program is what kicked off my thinking about the “company state” or “government plantation” model, whereby government services become an area’s core industry, with the revenue coming from other taxpayers or higher levels of government (such as state or federal taxpayers).
With these new grants, we should also put the matter in the context of political structures and incentives. Here we have cities competing to charm “public and private” outside interests with their proposals. That is, they’re competing to match the values of the Boston Fed and the people or groups funding the project. Sure, these “community” projects have local advocates (most often ideological activists, special interests, and other insiders), but ultimately, these projects are things being done to local constituents, not for them.
It’s time we stop seeing money that our governments manage to collect from other sources as money that we’ve somehow received. It isn’t. That’s especially true when it’s used for projects that the government wouldn’t otherwise have bothered to do. It’s money that goes to the sorts of people who know how to get government money and spent in order to shape our society in ways that other people want, not us.
The careful threads of political correctness are roping us into pens from which it’s impossible to communicate and alert our peers to invidious government scams.
Notre Dame Professor Patrick Deneen taps into an area of thinking that I’ve been spotting with more frequency. To my observation that we have no excuse for repeating errors that have been known for millennia, Deneen might respond (emphasis in original):
Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.
During my lifetime, lamentation over student ignorance has been sounded by the likes of E.D. Hirsch, Allan Bloom, Mark Bauerlein and Jay Leno, among many others. But these lamentations have been leavened with the hope that appeal to our and their better angels might reverse the trend (that’s an allusion to Lincoln’s first inaugural address, by the way). E.D. Hirsch even worked up a self-help curriculum, a do-it yourself guide on how to become culturally literate, imbued with the can-do American spirit that cultural defenestration could be reversed by a good reading list in the appendix. Broadly missing is sufficient appreciation that this ignorance is the intended consequence of our educational system, a sign of its robust health and success.
To my suggestion that progressive government is setting up a sort of “company state” in which everything is ordered toward the business model of providing government services and making others pay for them, Deneen would add (emphasis added):
Regardless of major or course of study, the main object of modern education is to sand off remnants of any cultural or historical specificity and identity that might still stick to our students, to make them perfect company men and women for a modern polity and economy that penalizes deep commitments. Efforts first to foster appreciation for “multi-culturalism” signaled a dedication to eviscerate any particular cultural inheritance, while the current fad of “diversity” signals thoroughgoing commitment to de-cultured and relentless homogenization.
Maybe his most important addition, however, is Deneen’s glimmer of hope:
On our best days, I discern their longing and anguish and I know that their innate human desire to know who they are, where they have come from, where they ought to go, and how they ought to live will always reassert itself.
That’s a difficult longing to fulfill. As Plato noted all those centuries ago, people once deluded in such a way “deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth,” and powerful forces in our society will give them every opportunity and excuse not to evaluate their sense that something’s missing.
As the scarcity of posts in this space illustrates, I’ve been extremely busy, this week. Things have slowed, but I’m still getting back on track.
One thing I’ve been doing has been to sift through the data available from the Family Prosperity Initiative (FPI). In summary, the conclusion seems to be inevitable that Rhode Islanders are good people who are just relatively unhappy, with something having happened around 2012 to reinforce that feeling, as suggested by adverse changes in things like new business establishments after that year. Notably, that was the year that Rhode Island first sank to 48th in the country by the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s Jobs & Opportunity Index (JOI), where it has remained since.
But the broad data from the FPI has some interesting contrast. Rhode Island does poorly on almost all markers, whether economic or having to do with healthy behavior, with an up-tick around that year in, for example, obesity. Yet other positive markers also jumped that year, or soon thereafter, including an increase in marriages, a decrease in divorces, an increase in weekly church attendance, and an increase in the percentage of children living in married households.
I wonder if some of these results are an indicator of two distinct paths’ that Rhode Islanders follow. I’ve long been saying that Rhode Island has been driving out its “productive class“; that is, people at a point in life during which they want to make progress and be productive tend to account for a disproportionate share of the Rhode Islanders parting for elsewhere. I’ve also been describing the “company state” mentality, whereby the state government pursues policies that increase the number of clients who give it justification for taking money from other people (the producers), in the state and elsewhere.
Maybe what the data shows is that, when a community gets in a funk, some people turn toward things that have traditionally led to stability, meaning, and success (religiosity and family), and other people turn to unhealthy behaviors, like drug use. This is speculation, at this point, but I’d wager that there’s a strong correlation between these two paths and the other options of leaving the state, on the one hand, or falling into government dependence, on the other.
Brexit and Luton don’t indicate a tension between latent nationalism and a more-enlightened elite, but between an economic model that creates opportunity and one that relies on mutual dependency.
I’ve been warning about the “company state” dynamic whereby an area’s core industry essentially becomes the provision of government services, with the revenue pulled in from the few productive residents and other cities, towns, and states. The goal becomes to attract and create as many dependents as possible so as to justify sending a larger bill to those who have no choice but to pay it. Eventually, though, the productive locals will leave or decide to join the dependent club, and other cities, towns, and states will refuse or no longer be able to cover the bills.
I wonder if that sort of civic and economic structure will set Rhode Island to be akin to the frontier areas as the Roman Empire receded. Here’s Jakub Grygiel:
In those frontier outposts, the locals have to make difficult decisions based on an assessment of how resilient their empire is, how persistent and dangerous the enemy appears, and how strong their own will is. And they experience different stages of geopolitical grief from denial and delusion to perhaps, in the best case, an attempt at indigenous security provision.
Clearly, Grygiel’s talking about security against invaders, but something similar seems likely to happen when a large class of people rely on handouts that simply cease to be handed out, whether one sees the recipients as a replacement for the invaders or you see them as the villagers failing to prepare to defend themselves against events that will damage or take their resources. Grygiel describes the stages as follows:
In some ways, we may already be well into the first stage, perhaps into the second. Government funds cannot be increased at the rate to which officials have become accustomed. Some things (roads and pensions) are showing the pressure on the finances, and intra-progressive political battles are beginning to pit special interests against each other. Next comes the refusal to adjust policies to the obvious future and a desperate search to find any and all sources of new revenue to keep the game going.
When that no longer works, we can expect a fatalism as some sit and stare at the financial wasteland and others refuse to let our society return to the principles of freedom, self control, and self reliance that allowed our society to be so successful in the first place.
Further to my post from earlier today, refer back to a Paul Edward Parker article from the Providence Journal last week. Noting that manufacturing and health care have more or less flipped places when it comes to number of jobs over the last 25 years, Parker writes:
Two factors figure prominently in the shift, according to Paul Harrington, an economist at Drexel University who has studied Rhode Island’s job market.
Manufacturing could be done other places and cheaper than in Rhode Island, while the manufacturing operations that stayed in Rhode Island switched to automation, getting more done with fewer, highly trained workers.
But health care has to be done where the patients are, and, by and large, robots haven’t taken over the jobs — at least not yet.
Health care — at least its provision and practice, as distinct from the production of its tools — is inherently a secondary industry. It serves people who are growing the economy doing other things. If those people are not present, there is nobody to whom to provide the care, and if they are not doing anything to grow wealth, there is no money to pay for their care.
This is another data point in the running theme that I drew from Lawrence, MA, and the notion that Rhode Island is becoming a “company state” — by which I meant to invoke the much maligned idea of a “company town” in which a single company provides most of the work and, insidiously, essentially owns the local government as a department to manage its employees’ lives. In part because government has destroyed economic incentives, the wealth-generating activities dry up, but those involved in government and its satellite industries (like health care and education) still want to keep their jobs, and (indeed) the demand for public services goes up as people lose work.
This turn of events produces all sorts of perverse incentives. First, perhaps, comes the urge for protectionism, to keep other local industries, other than government, going as much as possible, but undermining the ability of non-insiders to find new directions or innovation in existing industry. While hindering locals’ ability to respond to economic realities, the government also works to distort economic signals that people should consider going elsewhere, where there is work. These joint efforts create a filter that tends to push the most economically motivated residents out while drawing in those who haven’t been able to find work elsewhere. Naturally, because these people require government assistance (i.e., the services that government has decided to provide), government and its satellites don’t much mind the exchange, in the short term.
In the article, Drexel University Economist Paul Harrington sort of chokes on the concept that health care jobs are less desirable, for the local economy, than manufacturing jobs, but the reality is that they can’t be seen as an economy-sustaining industry. Indeed, to the degree that the government forces their growth, health care jobs might veryu well be a sign of impending collapse. Eventually the money dries up.