Letter 2 America for June 21, 2013

Dear America,

Though the six-gun is associated with the wild west, Colt, the manufacturer of the most famous of them started here in Connecticut.  As everyone knows by now, the Newtown Massacre also occurred here; it has led to a stolid gun control constituency and legislation to match in this state.  One of the results is that Colt Firearms is supposedly getting pressure from the gun lobby and its customer base to relocate its Hartford facilities in protest, and now Texas governor Rick Perry is here trying to facilitate a move to his home state.  You may remember Perry from the Republican presidential primaries as the dumbest of the candidates, and one of the shorter lived candidates as well.  But he is appearing on television inviting gun manufacturers to relocate to Texas, and in the case of Colt, such a move would represent a loss of about 1,000 jobs in this state.  In a state of four million residents, a thousand jobs lost is not a catastrophe, but any job losses are significant in this time of relatively high unemployment, so the Perry initiative vis-à-vis Colt is of interest here.  Presumably, he is trying to entice Colt executives with offers of tax breaks and planning and zoning advocacy that would make building a plant in Texas a more inviting prospect.  In fact, that is how the management in the town in which I live has tried to induce business and industry to locate here, but this was an agricultural town twenty years ago.  In the spring, you could smell manure in some parts of town, and you could still see corn growing and even a few cows grazing back then.  Now, all you see is traffic, new stores, and the vacancies in previously occupied buildings into which now-relocated businesses were induced to locate, and where they stayed only as long as their tax advantages lasted and until better ones were offered elsewhere.

A case in point was a group of high-tech labs that built things like laboratory measuring equipment here.  They moved to New Jersey after ten years in a building built on what used to be farm land, and now the building sits mostly empty, and it has been empty for almost as long as it was occupied by Gerber.  Just down the street from that building is a little strip mall that used to have seven or eight stores in it.  Now it has only two: a local grocery chain store and the liquor store next to it that survives on the walk-in traffic that the grocery store generates.  The rest of the store fronts are empty and decaying.  In fact, there are several other such sites in town, and they have turned what used to be open land into urbanesque blight, and that is what the Colt building in Hartford will be if Colt moves after a century or two in town.  But what Perry and those who employ his tactics to bring business to their states don't realize is that what they are doing to others today will be done to them tomorrow.  They will have to give away more and more just to get old businesses to stay, never mind getting new ones to relocate.  And the peregrinations of business will continue...yielding nothing in the end but more profits while the workers who populate their buildings all day and night gain nothing despite their ever increasing productivity as documented by many studies over the past ten years or so.  And the Rick Perry's of the country will never stop to contemplate the cost to the other tax payers of giving business a free ride in some cases and a cheap one in others, nor will they consider the blighting of their states and towns because the conservative theory is that if it's good for business, it's good for everyone else.

My theory is different.  I believe that such tactics as this are in effect catering, if not pandering to a predator, and the only ones getting a benefit are those who already have more than they can use.  It is another way in which our society is straining itself so that the wealthy can get more of what they already have and do so at the expense of the ordinary working person whose only real asset is the house he owns...with the bank...in the town where all the abandoned factories will stand until...and only if...someone decides to occupy them in the future with some new inducement from state and town that will have to be paid for either with higher rates for residents or a blighted landscape by the people who live there.  It is the internecine working of a form of capitalism that is cannibalistic, and unnecessarily so.  We need new business in this country, not the business of our neighbors a state away.  We need a business community that shares the responsibility that comes with great wealth and opportunity rather than one that will go where the money is, loyalty be damned.  As a nation, we gain nothing from the machinations of people like Rick Perry.  They tend to lend momentum to the creaming of our economy by the select few and they ensure the stagnation of the weal of the rest of us, and this guy claims that God is on his side, and he wants to be president.  God forbid.

Your friend,

Mike