It’s not just an out-of-control IRS or EPA. And it’s not merely the punitive demands and restraints of the new federal healthcare law.
American enterprise is being stifled and squelched by state and local governments, in ways that most Americans don’t even see. With increasing propensity, elected officials nationwide are at times suffocating private businesses with regulations, and at other times competing directly against them – and it happens among both Democrats and Republicans.
A striking reminder of this emerged last week, when it was reported that Democrat San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee was contemplating some sort of “ban” on alcohol sales during the Super Bowl. Drunken vandals got out of hand last year in “the City by the Bay,” when the Giants swept the World Series. The same thing could happen on Super Bowl Sunday this year, with either a 49ers win or loss. So, therefore, the city should step in and try to keep the booze away from the bad guys – at least that’s how the official reasoning went.
The news first emerged with local newspaper and radio websites reporting that the Mayor was seeking a ban. By the time global publications like “International Business Times” had picked up on it, the Mayor had tempered his rhetoric a bit, saying that he was “seeking input from business owners” on how to prevent alcohol-induced vandalism.
The irony here is obvious. This is, after all, San Francisco, a place where, in terms of social and cultural “norms,” almost anything goes. It’s the city where elected officials almost did not pass a ban on public nudity for the first time last November, and yet city officials now want to control liquor consumption.
But here’s the part of the story that nobody reports: such mandates by local governments, arbitrary and unexpected as they often are, damage businesses. Restaurant and bar owners all over the country are naturally banking on steady foot traffic and lots of food and beverage sales on Super Bowl Sunday. No doubt some owners craft their monthly or quarterly budgets around an expected uptick in sales on that day. When politicians disrupt this, they hurt small business owners.
But travel northward some 1200 miles or so from San Francisco, and a less imaginable, more difficult to understand phenomena is happening with private enterprise the worse for it. The state government of Idaho has actually developed a voracious appetite for buying and owning for-profit small businesses of a variety of sorts, and competing against private owners.
Language in that state’s Constitution declares that the land originally granted from the federal government for the creation of Idaho must be managed “in such manner as will secure the maximum long term financial return to the institution to which granted.” From that language, Idaho politicians down through the ages have determined that they have a “fiduciary responsibility” to produce investment returns. So once the first of the original endowment lands were sold, a trust account was established, and state politicians have been “investing” the money in for-profit businesses ever since.
In the past four years alone, the state government of Idaho has purchased everything from a neighborhood beer pub to commercial office space, all under the leadership of Republican Governor C.L “Butch” Otter. This controversial practice came under national criticism back in 2010 when the Idaho government bought “Affordable Storage,” a small self-storage business in the capitol city of Boise, and then began telling would-be customers that “our rates are lower because we don’t have to pay taxes.” Ask residents of “red state” Idaho what they think of President Obama’s forced acquisitions of General Motors and the Chrysler Corporation, and they’ll likely tell you it was wrong. Yet most are unaware that their own state government is doing much the same as the President has done, and is competing against their business-owning neighbors.
While it’s hard to find an American politician who will tell you that they are anything short of “supportive” when it comes to small business ownership, it’s even more difficult to find one that really understands what it means to be that type of leader. The change in government policies that our nation needs won’t begin to happen, until American voters start paying attention and making better choices on election day.
Some courageous American leaders are trying to prevent another California budget disaster.
But if Big Labor gets its way, the preventative measures will be abandoned.
So numerous are the examples of true statesmanship outside of Washington, that I can’t name all the individuals involved. But here are three state-wide elected leaders you should know about, whose efforts to save their states – and our nation – are absolutely not going unpunished.
The most high-profile among them is Scott Walker, the Republican Governor of Wisconsin. After taking office in January of 2011, Governor Walker proposed the “Wisconsin Budget Repair bill” to begin addressing his state’s projected $4 billion deficit.
As part of his efforts, Governor Walker sought to require unionized government employees to pay for portions of their own healthcare coverage and retirement pensions (standard fare for those of us employed in the private sector), and to bring the salaries of unionized government employees more in line with the salaries of private sector workers.
The chaos that labor unions created in Madison last year was widely covered in the national media. Today, because of his grave sins of trying to save his state from California-styled budget crises and creating more parity between government and private sector employment, Governor Walker may be on his way to making history.
Big Labor has successfully forced a recall election on June 5th of this year (costing Wisconsin taxpayers in excess of $15 million). If Wisconsin voters side with the unions on Election Day, Scott Walker will become the third Governor in U.S. history to be removed from office by recall.
Next there’s Democrat Gina Raimondo, the current Treasurer of Rhode Island. Raimondo campaigned in 2010 with the message that, as the smallest state in the union, Rhode Island nonetheless had a very big financial mess on its hands. If things didn’t change, she warned, the Ocean State would eventually end up like Athens.
Raimondo took office in January of 2011 (the same time Governor Scott Walker did). Soon after, she began working on legislative proposals that sought to better manage the state’s liquid assets, provide more financial transparency with how Rhode Island manages state retirement pensions, and – once again – to bring government employment benefits slightly more in-line with the private sector.
Now, less than seven months after the Rhode Island legislature and Governor Lincoln Chafee approved the government pension overhaul measures, Big Labor has successfully pressured enough members of the state’s General Assembly to legislatively threaten a repeal of much of what Treasurer Raimondo proposed in the first place. The unions have not yet been as inclined to publicly smear and attack Democrat Raimondo as they have been with elected Republicans, but Raimando nonetheless remains the target of vilification as she seeks to save her native state from falling off a fiscal cliff.
And then there is Idaho’s Republican State Superintendent of Education, Tom Luna. After his re-election in November of 2010, Luna proposed a series of three legislative reforms of the state’s public schools in January of 2011, entitled the “Students Come First” laws.
One of the Students Come First laws was to provide for more technology and online educational access in classrooms (rural Idaho has some of the worst internet infrastructure in the nation); another was to require transparency in how local school districts spend taxpayer funds and negotiate union contracts; and another was to allow teachers to earn merit-based bonus pay. After the proposals were introduced in the legislature, Idaho’s capitol city of Boise quickly erupted into a “mini-Wisconsin” type of uprising, and the reforms were almost scuttled.
Students and teachers skipped school and traveled to the capitol to protest. The teacher’s union and the state’s newspaper of record nicknamed “Students Come First” the “Luna Laws,” as a targeted smear campaign on the Superintendent unfolded. Luna’s personal vehicle was vandalized; his elderly mother was harassed at her home; and high school students marched at the capitol holding laptop computers chanting “this is not my teacher” (in response to the union’s spin that “Luna wants to replace teachers with laptops”).
In the spring of 2011 the Students Come First legislation narrowly passed in the legislature, and Idaho Governor Butch Otter signed the bills into law. Yet shortly thereafter, Big Labor sent enough petition signature gatherers in to Idaho from around the country and collected enough signatures to force a referendum on the reform laws.
Now Big Labor has hired Dave Williams, a political operative who has won government union victories in legislatures and at ballot boxes in Ohio, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin. The AFL CIO appears ready to spend upwards of a million dollars to repeal the three education reform laws, activists are attempting their third effort to recall Superintendent Luna, and the state Republican Party has thus far refused to weigh-in on any of it.
Can America move in the right direction and save itself from the death spiral of debt? We don’t lack for statesmen and women who are willing to make the hard decisions, but voters must see through unions’ charade of selfishness.
