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Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Shop at home — or else.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In small-town Georgia this time of year downtown merchants and business leaders actively promote “shop at home” campaigns. I’m a sucker for such appeals. Even though many small town merchants charge prices that are are substantially higher than those at a Wal-mart, K-mart, Kohl or Target, I’m inclined to buy. And why? Because they support the local football teams and local fund-raising campaigns. They’re often fixtures in the community. They go out of their way often to be helpful. And the community’s stronger when storefronts are filled with something other than flea markets, antique stores and start-up churches.
What I choose to do with my own money and what government chooses to do with what it extracts from me under authority of law are entirely different. DeKalb County commissioners voted 5-1 to approve a Local Small Business Enterprise ordinace that gives a preference to contractors bidding for government work who hire a fixed percentage of local workers.
DeKalb is saying that it is willing to pay more for the services it buys, and therefore to impose a higher levy on its tax-paying residents, to reward companies for hiring locals. If it presumes to use government coercively to, in effect, force residents to “shop at home” it needs a far more compelling reason than DeKalb appears to have laid out.
It is, in any event, another example of how Big Government politicians use the authority of law to create social programs. They either set them up and administer them directly, as is the case with farm subsidies, Medicaid, welfare and the like. Or they hide them in regulation, as is the case with the DeKalb ordianance. Or they force business to absorb them and pay for them, in various kinds of health care mandates for example.
Fighting back the growth of big, coercive government is a full-time job. But let us not depart DeKalb County without saying a kind word about Commissioner Elaine Boyer, the sole member of the commission to oppose the legislation. She argued correctly that it interferes with the free market and is likely to prompt a lawsuit. The cynics amongst us wonder how democracy can take root in a place like Iraq. Well, look to the barren soil of DeKalb County, where fiscal conservativism has been beaten to the ground — and yet a free market conservative survives and keeps her sanity.
