After reading David Black’s response (to Paul Barker’s blog post, “Stick to the Plan“), I thought, “I get it, ‘Don’t worry about habeas corpus, just worry about the hanging!’”
Control over an economy, and the comprehensive planning of how that economy is shaped, has always been a political concern. Who is in control of the planning is exceedingly important, as history has revealed, even in our own community. Ironically, that subject was just recently addressed in an article entitled, “China’s Coming Economic Slowdown,” by Josef Joffe in The Wall Street Journal’s Weekend “Review” section, Oct. 25, 2013. In that article, Mr. Joffe discusses “rent seeking,” the economic term for an economy that is “guided” or managed by government, and explains that “authoritarian or ‘guided’ modernization plants the seeds of its own demise.”
Mr. Joffe cites the social scientist Francis Fukuyama, who, reflecting on the French ancien régime, explained the concept of rent seeking, as follows: “In such a society, the elites spend all of their time trying to capture public office in order to secure a rent for themselves”—in effect, seeking to gain more economic return through political control than a free market would grant. Put in other words, rent-seeking is “the game of the mighty” to “convert public power into personal profit.” The phraseology that I have used to describe Harrisburg’s political game is “privatizing profits and socializing losses.”
“Rent seeking” is an incestuous political game where government and favored, organized interests, work together. Government raises the banner of economic advantage through planning and managing the advertised outcome; in turn, favored interests seek and are given more power in the form of monopolies, subsidies, tax breaks and protection so as to increase their “rents.” “Licenses, building permits, capital, import barriers and anticompetitive regulations go to the state’s own or to favored players, breeding corruption and inefficiency.” And, as Mr. Joffe concludes, “This widening web of collusion breeds either stagnation or revolt.”
This is true whether under socialism/communism or corporate capitalism. It is true whether in China or in the United State under an increasingly managed economy. It is true at the national, state and local levels. The regime “rent-seekers” include both the Democratic and Republican parties.
You can watch it play out in Harrisburg, first under Reed, then under Thompson, and now the hope is Papenfuse (the “new face of the old regime”)–“trying to capture public office in order to secure a rent for themselves.” Just look at the comprehensive planning process they tried foisting on us– both the LT and Papenfuse gangs together–trying to plot out how they intend to plan the projects and secure the grants, loans, subsidies and tax breaks that go with them. It is all just part of the “Harrisburg Wrong Plan.”
Nevin Mindlin is a former independent candidate for Harrisburg mayor.
