Public officials in Kansas City and elsewhere are eager to be seen as job creators. Almost every taxpayer-subsidized development project, every act of crony capitalism, every public project like a new $1.2 billion airport terminal, $62 million-per-mile streetcar, or convention hotel is discussed in terms of the jobs it will create. Politicians tells us, as they did in the TIF Commission hearing for the Burns & Mac handout, that the city cannot “wait for the free market,” that government must act.
But is government’s use of taxpayer dollars more successful than people making their own decisions?
Economist Enrico Moretti was interviewed on NPR’s Here and Now about his book, The New Geography of Jobs. He was asked about how successfully innovative regions are created and replicated [segment begins at 8:27]:
“[Interviewer] This is the unsettling part of your book: How do cities replicate these innovative job clusters?
“[Moretti] It’s very tough, because if you look historically where the innovation clusters are located, almost none of them [were] created by some deliberate, explicit policy. It’s really hard to engineer an innovation cluster. We talk about Seattle, but if you look at a lot of the clusters, they were all born in very random, often serendipitous, ways. So it’s really hard for policy makers to engineer from scratch.”
There is no magic formula known to bureaucrats or politicians about which companies and industries will be successful in the future. But they use public resources time and again chasing that white rabbit of jobs and growth. And unfortunately, the impact of taxing many businesses to subsidize a few is more often than not a recipe for destroying jobs, or at least keeping them away.
A better investment, as Show-Me has argued for years, is for government’s action to be broad and neutral: keep taxes low for everyone, maintain infrastructure, deliver necessary city services, and ensure quality education. Maybe those aren’t as appealing as large edifices named after politicians, but they are more successful.
