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Monday, May 15. 2017

Dying towns are due to capitalism, complains Atlantic writer

If Declining Towns 'Deserve to Die,' Where Should Their Residents Go?


Dying towns are indeed due to labor needs and labor markets, but I do not see any positive role for government in that. Negative role? Certainly. It's easy to tax businesses away. Some towns have to shrink into villages and hamlets, while other places far away become boom towns. It was forever thus. 


When a town loses its tax base, it is done as a place. Ghost town, EBT-land, tattooland, boarded-up-land, meth and heroin-land. It does come to that. I have seen those towns, and so has Charles Murray. Eventually, the only decent jobs are government jobs, and then they go away too. Feudalism was good for villages and the serfs always had work.


Major urban centers, worldwide, continue to be the places with economic opportunity and cultural vitality. Rural life isn't the romantic fantasy that some imagine, unless it's a rustic second home getaway.  


How ya gonna keep them down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?



Posted by The Barrister in Hot News & Misc. Short Subjects at 18:58 | Comments (9) | Trackbacks (0)

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Another example where the problem is bad, but the solutions are worse.

Vermont nad half of NH emptied in the first half of the 1800's, farmers moving to the midwest where the soil did not grow a new crop of rocks every year. Many of those towns did not reach that population again until the 21st C, and a few still have not. Was that a bad thing? Well, it was for some but not for most.

Villages in Eastern Europe are shrinking as their bright young people move to find better jobs in Bonn or Dublin.
#1 Assistant Village Idiot (Link) on 2017-05-16 00:01 (Reply)
It makes you wonder, the Civil War. It gave American males a chance to see a wider world than what they grew up in and make a life changing choice to leave for greener pastures. They saw them damn near everywhere they went as young farmers and apothecaries and damned if they didn't latch onto a good thing and all head west when the war ended.
#1.1 bistro on 2017-05-16 00:22 (Reply)
Consider places like East Cleveland which is on its way out and leaving behind a wake of destitution, destruction, crime and despair. Like Detroit but on a smaller scale.
#2 bistro on 2017-05-16 00:18 (Reply)
Hundreds of townships are doing just fine because they, like their residents, live within their means. When local and county officials start voting fat pensions for themselves it's time to put your house on the market and look elsewhere.
#3 Honordads (Link) on 2017-05-16 04:10 (Reply)
The problem with most of these dying towns are that they are bloodsuckers to any enterprise, doubly true if they have a tradition of strong unionism. Any business that comes within their grasp is quickly sucked dry by the local taxes and deferred public works. Yes, they will grant tax breaks to large companies, but that just puts more sucking on the small business where real growth happens. And even with tax breaks, it's only a couple years before they attack the large capital investment with unionization.

It is safer to do business in the large cities with lots of economic activity to provide cover from the revenue vampires down at the small town city hall.
#4 JK Brown on 2017-05-16 10:14 (Reply)
Where are the residents of dying towns supposed to go? Is this a trick question?

The traditional answer was, "To some town that's not dying." Where they have things like jobs. Do we think we can pass a law to change this dynamic? Or that we should if we could?
#5 Texan99 on 2017-05-16 11:13 (Reply)
When I was working on my MBA I wrote a paper on federally and locally subsidized businesses. My example was a food operation that made frozen pizzas for supermarket sales. Their property taxes were waived. Their building permits and fees were waived. Virtually all government fees/taxes were waived for a number of years and the company in turn agreed to hire people on welfare. A few years later about the time that the waivers ran out the company went out of business. The building is now owned by a HVAC company which presumably pays their taxes. It was a tax avoidance scam facilitated by the various governments at all levels. I suspect that the owner(s) simply moved on after the waivers played out to another venue and more waivers.
#6 IdahoBob on 2017-05-16 12:20 (Reply)
To the Barrister,

Sometimes others including greens, planners and lawyers destroy towns. Blitz made gas cans forever and was the biggest employer in their home town. Trial lawyers went after them everytime a good ol boy poured gasoline on a fire and got burned. Both company and town went out of business.

There seems to be no "precautionary principle" when government regulations or liability law are concerned.


https://stateimpact.npr.org/oklahoma/2012/07/09/why-the-largest-maker-of-portable-gas-cans-is-going-out-of-business/
#7 DirtyJobsGuy on 2017-05-17 09:37 (Reply)
My response:

Big city life isn't the romantic fantasy that some imagine, unless it's a weekend getaway to enjoy sight-seeing or a pro ball game.

"Major urban centers, worldwide, continue to be the places with economic opportunity and cultural vitality"

Economic opportunity isn't everything, and for most the city is an expensive place with cramped housing, bad traffic and poor schools. There is a reason that westward expansion happened. Your cultural vitality comment reeks of elitism.

Big city life is not Friends, Seinfeld or Sex in the City. Regardless, liberty means not having this model imposed on everyone else, whether by over gov't fiat or through tax and economic policy and incentives.
#8 DrTorch on 2017-05-23 09:14 (Reply)

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