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Cleveland
Plain Dealer...
Want
jobs in Ohio? Leash government
By Kevin O’Brien
One of the standard
complaints from
critics of Gov. John Kasich’s administration and the current
Republican-run
Ohio General Assembly is that GOP candidates promised to focus on jobs,
then
got into office and focused on abortion and union-busting.
Now
that Kasich’s JobsOhio creation is
picking up momentum and actually beginning to change things around, the
push-back from the usual critics is changing from a dismissive, “What’s
he
doing?” to a scandalized, “What’s he doing?”
What
he’s doing is exactly what the
voters elected him to do. He’s using the clunky, bureaucratic, top-down
structure of government to try to create jobs. If he succeeds, it will
either
be in spite of the apparatus he’s working with, or it will be because
he has
managed to shove enough of the apparatus out of the way to allow
private-sector
growth.
Government
is a lousy job creator.
It’s the only tool Kasich can work with directly, and he seems willing
to put
it to work doing what little it can, but hold your applause: The lesson
of
history is that any good effects from government efforts will be
expensively
negligible.
By
shifting many of the functions of
the Ohio Department of Development to his JobsOhio program, the
governor is
making a bid to increase bureaucratic agility -- at least partly by, as
his
critics correctly note, decreasing transparency.
That’s
a problem. Even Ohioans who
genuinely want to see him shake things up are unlikely to be satisfied
with,
“Trust me.” Meanwhile, the crowd that blathers endlessly about
“corporate
greed” and Republicans who favor Big Business -- conveniently ignoring
Democrats’ Siamese-twin relationship with Big Labor -- are firing up
their word
processors.
JobsOhio
may prove to be a marginal
improvement, but it’s unlikely to be an improvement measurable enough
to peel
the scales from unbelievers’ eyes.
The
same can be said of Kasich’s
tinkering with the Third Frontier, the voter-approved fund designed to
help new
technologies take root in Ohio.
By
getting the Third Frontier
Commission to put $14.8 million in the hands of six economic
development
nonprofits around Ohio, the administration harks back to an old
approach that
never made economic sense and that makes political sense only when
money is
plentiful: distributing dollars like fertilizer from a broadcast
spreader, then
hoping some grass will grow somewhere.
The
regional groups will pull the old,
familiar levers, brokering tax deals between favored businesses and
state and
local governments. They may even do so in the service of some good,
marketable
ideas. But it’s fair to expect a lot of that money to go to waste on
misfires.
Meanwhile,
a financially diminished,
more politically charged Third Frontier will continue working to
identify The
Next Big Thing so Ohio can get in on the ground floor and win big. And
the
chances of that dream coming true will continue hovering right around
zero.
Why?
Because no one -- not Team NEO,
not the Third Frontier Commission and not its National Science
Foundation
analysts -- can pick winners better than the market...
Read
the rest of the editorial at the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
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