George Harris KC Star Reader Advisory Panel 2008

Hardly a day has gone by in the last several months without an alarm being sounded that the election could transform the nation into a socialist state...or without one more example that it has already been so transformed.

We don’t need to look beyond our own city limits to see proof of a transformation created by capitalists who likely would claim to fear a philosophy of “sharing the wealth.”

At Arrowhead Stadium yesterday, I saw the multimillion dollar renovation project being paid for by taxpayers for the primary benefit of a wealthy, privately owned business.

On the way to the stadium, I drove by the site of the proposed stadium for the Kansas City Wizards, another private business, albeit not so wealthy as the Chiefs.

On Thanksgiving night, I drove by the construction of the West End hotel project, supported by tax increment financing, an economic development tool designed to improve blighted areas but turned upside down to support projects in several tony parts of town.

Last Tuesday I drove through downtown and saw the gleaming H&R Block building and the Power and Light District, both of which were funded by TIF programs.

These “partnerships” between the city government and private business are not, as promised, enhancing sales and property tax revenues for the community but instead are draining the city treasury and reducing money available for critical services and infrastructure.

Sharing the wealth in America has turned into a reverse Robin Hood operation for the benefit of some of the wealthiest people in the nation. The $20 billion government “investment” in CitiGroup did not derail the banking conglomerate’s plan to buy naming rights for the new Mets stadium in New York for $400 million. A wealthy corporation getting government money and giving a piece of it back to benefit another wealthy corporation whose employees are mostly millionaires.

Yet Congress’s outrage seems directed primarily at a proposal to lend $25 billion to car companies so they can try to hold onto jobs that directly or indirectly employ millions of average Americans.

In its strictest definition, socialism is the government owning and controlling the nation’s means of production. But a stretched out definition includes any government program to use tax dollars taken from some for the benefit of others. The latter definition would include agricultural subsidies, historic building tax credits, hybrid car tax credits, and an almost endless list of other government tax rules.

But whenever government uses tax dollars for something other than basic government functions ( such as defense, road building, law enforcement) the economics of the market are distorted. No more true capitalism. Such distortion inevitably produces inefficiency, not wealth.

The greatest danger facing the nation today is the complete melding of corporate interests with government at the national and local level. President Eisenhour warned of the military industrial complex that profits from the nation’s military conflicts. Alan Greenspan declared the obvious that the country went to war in Iraq over oil.

Here in Kansas City we should not try to eliminate all economic development programs, any more than the federal government should eliminate use of its revenue to protect the vulnerable and to achieve fairness and justice for all citizens.

But we should not be blind to the hypocrisy of the sophistry of special interests that cry socialism regarding tax policies and programs that benefit the average person but define socialism for corporations as “economic development.”

Mayor Funkhouser may be quirky, but he appears to have tried to rein in some of the excesses of corporate giveaways that have placed Kansas City in a precarious economic condition. It remains to be seen whether he and the city council can manage the city out of the financial problems that are likely to get worse before they get better.