Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo’s inflated view of the power of government was on full display when she announced success at having bought off some more companies with taxpayer dollars:

“It’s not everyday you can say by lunchtime you’ve created 2,000 jobs,” Gov. Gina M. Raimondo, who chairs the board, said as the meeting got underway.

Two of the companies, iXblue, a maritime navigation manufacturer, and Infinity Meat Solutions, which will package and process fresh meats, were lured to Rhode Island from other states by the incentives programs.

“We’d prefer to stay in Massachusetts,” Mack Barber, president and chief executive of iXblue, told the board. “This program brought us here.” He went on to say that it wasn’t just the incentives, but also the interest that state officials showed in bringing the company here.

Raimondo’s spin comes with multiple layers of “umm, no.”  Government doesn’t get credit for “creating” jobs just by giving corporate welfare to the businesses that do the work of creating.  That is especially true when the jobs were so explicitly stolen from other states.  “We’d prefer to stay in Massachusetts” sounds more like resignation than a creative impulse.

Moreover, we’ll never know what jobs might have been created in Rhode Island by Rhode Islanders who would “prefer to stay” in Rhode Island if it weren’t for the forced transfer of their wealth to these companies, and the competitive advantage that these companies gain by engaging the corrupt system.

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Want to see real job creation in Rhode Island?  Get the government out of the way so that businesses want to come here without incentives and residents have every opportunity to build their dreams into vocations.