This article was submitted to Amerikaner.org by Grant Norman. If you would like to submit your own content, please email amerikanercontributions@proton.me
Late last month, Route-Fifty.com posted an article that described “The Fresh Economic Development Strategy Emerging in the Midwest”. The article is a valuable look at one of the challenges that the Midwest and her people face. Honeyed words hide a poison, which aims at further destruction of the Midwest.
At first glance, the article posits a valuable counterweight to the Republican Party orthodoxy that the only way to attract businesses and jobs to one’s community is to bend over backwards to please corporate interests.
Deregulation, union busting, and other Reaganite measures helped attract businesses to the South within the United States, and low-wages and less stringent employee and environmental protections encouraged offshoring factories to foreign shores.
In contrast, the Midwest’s development strategy is described as being a people-centric model of economic development, by “trying to attract residents by promoting quality of life benefits”. Instead of racing to the bottom in order to be one of the lower links on the supply chain, the goal is to provide amenities that will bring high-skilled workers to the region, with the expectation that jobs will follow.
This is not a new idea. The development of social safety nets in Germany before the First World War allowed for that country to become the leader in heavy industry and chemistry, to say nothing of its military and political importance. By providing for the most basic needs of workers and their families, the German Empire was able to build the most talented workforce and some of the most innovative companies in the world.
Taking care of families and the unemployed may have been driven by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s campaign against Marxists, but the results were impressive enough that they became a hallmark of Germany’s economic might ever since. Rather than racing toward the bottom, the Germans have rejected the ideology of the lowest common denominator in favor of enabling workers and owners to reach for new heights.
A people-centric development model could be following in this proud tradition, a fulfillment of the largely German nature of the Midwest’s population. However, what the states described in this article are pursuing is something else: a twisted version of the social legislation that made Germany great.
Instead of assisting with family formation, the strategy pioneered in this article is one of appealing to rootless, single individuals. While lamenting the slow rate of population growth in the region, the prescriptions of the economists cited is to make the region more attractive for young, unattached individuals instead of growing the populations that made those states so attractive. Instead of asking why the Midwest has such a high quality of life, the cited economists are wondering why the coasts should be the destination for rootless professionals, when they could be coming to Indiana or Iowa instead.
The experts cited in this article propose some measures that would improve livelihoods for local residents, but the impetus for engaging in such policies would be attracting the outsiders. With that as the highest goal, there is little limit to the destructive, anti-social policies that might be pursued in order to attract what may be nothing more than a stereotyped idea of what a young professional would want. They would erode and flatten out the local character and customs out of a desire to make a secondary Midwestern city into the attractive destination that Seattle or San Francisco once were. The race to the bottom becomes a societal contest disguised by economic rhetoric.
Already we have seen states in the Midwest and the South bend to the demands of dictates when traditional morality conflicts with the libertinism of companies and their desired workers. Make no mistake; this economic development strategy is not designed to help the people in the areas being targeted. When the choice is between supporting the transplanted ravagers demanding a pride parade or the real, rooted community already in place, which do you think the powers that be will side with?
The article closes on a seemingly optimistic note: “Some places are going to do really well if you’ve got good schools, very little blight, little crime, things to do in your town; we’ll see migration to those places.” It is not hard for those who know to read threatening meaning into those words. We have already seen how outsiders have treated their new homes in Idaho and other western regions.
How long can our communities remain ours if attracting outsiders takes priority over caring for our own?
Excellent work!