Craig Ladwig
“It is a fundamental principle of social philosophy, fixed and unchangeable, that one should not withdraw from individuals and commit to the community what they can accomplish by their own enterprise and industry.”
“To be free and to be independent is to be a part of something bigger than oneself,” Chesterton wrote. “The idea is to get back to a society where people can live together as neighbors and not just as wage slaves or bureaucratic cogs.”
That’s not what we believe anymore. My city is obsessed with things getting bigger no matter what. We applaud every new downtown parking garage, every hotel, every expanded riverfront or mixed-use configuration. In fact, we had a successful baseball stadium but we had to build a bigger one.
Without disparaging the motives of our town boosters, could it be that concrete and rebar are not worthy goals for a community? Communities are about people, lest we forget, and “build it and they will come” is just a line from a movie.
Can we pause for a moment and think in another direction. What would happen if we got smaller but better? What if we decided that giving money to big companies promising to bring jobs to town was not working as we had hoped. Perhaps, for instance, we should think twice before we replace our home-based individually owned firms with distant widely held corporations.
Indeed, my Catholic friends tell me that such a thought is the heart of a specific teaching, It is the message of Pope Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical: “It is a fundamental principle of social philosophy, fixed and unchangeable, that one should not withdraw from individuals and commit to the community what they can accomplish by their own enterprise and industry.”
Economists call that the Principle of Subsidiary Function. It says the burden of proof for any acquisition or displacement should rest with the larger entity. Moreover, there is an economic school, Distributism, that argues that large widely held corporations should be actively discouraged with local tax policies. Smaller is better, in other words, and local is best.
If papal encyclicals and formal principles are too heavy for you, how about some plain old journalism? The economist Wes Davenport, writing in this week’s National Review, says our “we’re getting bigger” ribbon-cuttings are overrated:
“It’s important to understand how jobs actually are — and are not. — created. New jobs do not cause a local economy to grow. Rather, a growing local economy creates new jobs. It’s the context of that local economy, the conditions that either help or hurt people and businesses, that creates the need for new jobs.”
On the negative side, crime is particularly devastating to job-creation. It would seem to be the first order of business in any serious economic-development campaign. But few politicians want to buck the woke narratives that oppose tough sentencing and aggressive policing.
In any case, Davenport doubts local Chamber-of-Commerce types know much about what really creates jobs, that is, new ways of meeting consumer demand and discovering new consumer desires. Their offices do neither.
“Economic-development agencies conflate jobs with growth when neither can be predicted in detail,” he says. “These hollow promises come with very real costs: Besides government spending, these agencies interfere with the broader economy by advantaging some companies (large corporations) over their competitors. Government-favored industries get a boost, while innovation and entrepreneurship get smothered by red tape and taxation.”
It is not to be against excellence or even progress to stand up every once in a while to ask if this or that, however fine the architectural renderings, makes any sense.
Craig Ladwig is editor of the quarterly Indiana Policy Review. Send comments to [email protected]. The Indiana Policy Review Foundation is a nonprofit education foundation focused on state and municipal issues. It is free of outside control by any individual, organization or group. It exists solely to conduct and distribute research on Indiana issues.