This talk explores economic decline in cities, property rights, even home rule. There has been a lot of talk about ‘public-private partnership’. Push infrastructure costs down, down to the local level, to local budgets, and the free local market, down to local mavericks and mavens. Kelo kind of threw a wet blanket on the PPP.
So did Iraq. I’ve made my fortune, so this little confession is just a little way for an old scalawag like me to ‘give back.’
Let’s talk about cities. Cities are sources and barometers of local, state, and national wellbeing. Cities are sources of well-being (and good cigars), in the ‘civilized’ world.
They can decline. When the lights go out, you’re back in the middle ages.
Responsibility for decline is blamed by some ‘conservative’ ‘property rights’ pundits in part on federal subsidies: the GI bill, mortgage tax breaks, home loan guarantees, suburban highways. ‘Communist plots…..’
Some people think the ‘free market’ should have been allowed to ‘take its course’. Why subsidize mortgages, why give anybody a break; why subsidize anything?
I made a killing on tax breaks, especially corporate ones. Let’s put it this way, Thurston Howell likes tax breaks that like him. Is that ‘the free market’, or not? I don’t know. I don’t care.
I do know this: these subsidies created, for some, like me and a few million of my WWII vet pals, the American dream. Sure I fought in the war, too. You kiddin.
These subsidies were promoted to strengthen America, and the so-called free world, against communism, and then, even, supposedly, ‘defeated’ it, in the Cold War.
I hate communism! But tax breaks, concessions, subsidies, and credits, now that’s a little different story. Thurston Howell loves tax breaks.
No comments:
Post a Comment