The Outstater
Beware of ‘Trustworthy Guys’
I DON’T OFTEN draw parallels between Venezuela and Indiana but when I do they keep me up at night.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Madura is attracting U.S. investors by fashioning himself as “pro-business,” reports the Wall Street Journal. This is a Marxist who oversaw the economic collapse of his nation and the exodus of a quarter of its citizenry.
“Your investment is welcome in Venezuela,” he now says in his best Chamber of Commerce voice, “We can work together toward a different U.S-Venezuela relationship. We guarantee stability, legal security, peace, win-win relations.”
Madura, who is expected to rig his reelection this week, is cutting deals with individual U.S. businessmen offering special government consideration and protection. “I’m a man of my word, a trustworthy guy,” he pronounced.
In this way Madura’s new strategy is the same as that of the Indiana Economic Development Commission (IEDC) — that is, to use the favors of government to reward select businesses.
Does it matter than in neither case the society in general benefits, the profits going elsewhere while the public debt increases? Not at all. Amoral international corporations want those “win-win” deals that only government can ensure. But if Madura has discovered the benefits of capitalist enterprise why doesn’t he extend it to his country at large?
Well, you wouldn’t need a dictator then, would you?
Here in Indiana, if tax breaks, rebates and sweetheart bonding help big corporations why not offer them to every Indiana business? Is it because the “trustworthy guys” who run the IEDC think like tinhorn dictators, that they and not participants in a free market know best?
The economist Friedrich Hayek said that fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion. That sounds about right. — tcl
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REGARDING THINGS that don’t work, consider these recent news items:
- “Prominent community (anti-violence) activist Ron Gee was fatally shot Thursday morning, his family has confirmed. Gee was shot and killed just before 11 a.m. at a Citgo gas station at 38th Street and Arlington Avenue. When officers arrived they found Gee still in a vehicle. Details about what led to the shooting were not immediately released. It’s the second time Gee has been shot. In 2018 he was critically injured in a shooting the afternoon of Christmas Eve I-65 near the 21st Street exit.”
— Jade Jackson in the July 18 Indy Star
- “In 2017, the University of Chicago polled its U.S. Economic Experts Panel of high-profile economists on whether subsidizing sports stadiums was likely to generate a positive return for the government. A confidence-weighted 83 percent of the panel that included seven Nobel Prize winners in economics agreed that stadium subsidies aren’t worth the cost, 11 percent weren’t sure and just 4 percent — one single economist — were in favor.” Indeed, a 2022 survey of the academic research on stadium subsidies by three former presidents of the North American Association of Sports Economists declared that there was no point in studying the stadium subsidy ROI (return on investment) question as it would only be “confirming what is already known to researchers in the field.” They suggested that time would be better spent getting politicians to read the research.
— John Mozena in the July 18 Reason Magazine
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