Stories about funding changes under the Trump administration put a giant spotlight on the different ways of thinking on the left and the right.  Consider the beginning of an article from last March (although it is new to me) by Rob Smith, in ecoRI News:

As chaos and uncertainty continue to be unleashed on federal agencies thanks to the policies of the Trump administration, the Ocean State’s blue economy is just starting to feel those downstream impacts.

While federal jobs by themselves don’t play an outsized role in the state’s economy, many functions of scientific marine research, marine resource management, and commercial fishing rely heavily on federal initiatives or funding.

The way in which Rhode Island has increasingly managed for the future might be called the “blue economy” not so much because it involves water and the ocean as because it follows the Democrat (i.e., blue) worldview.  In essence, that means the emphasis is put on economic activities that require government involvement, especially for funding.

In what we might call a “red economy,” individuals identify some area of advantage in themselves, in their communities, or in their surrounding landscape; they invest their own labor and resources; and they generate something that has value that other people recognize enough to pay for voluntarily.  The “blue economy,” in contrast, entails finding something of value to political constituencies who are willing to advocate for government to take money away from other people based on a claim of either moral obligation or future returns of value.

The two variants are not necessarily pure.  A “purple economy” can arise to fill a gap between cost and value on the red side or when private investors or customers are attracted to a subsidized industry on the blue side.  For a conservative to me, however, purple usually looks more blue than red.

One way to determine the preference of an individual or region is the extent of entitlement on display.  On the red side, if people stop buying the product, that’s a problem to solve through innovation or marketing.  It’s the seller’s responsibility to keep the market alive.  On the blue side, it’s the responsibility of the buyer — or at least the payer — to keep the cash infusions coming.

Picture a classic New England mill that’s reliant on a small stream in the forest.  From the red perspective, the position of the stream creates the value, and if it shifts or dries up, the miller has to move find some alternative.  From the blue perspective, the stream is artificial, anyway, and exists by right, so if it stops flowing, somebody else is withholding the flow.

In the case of Rhode Island’s “blue economy,” blame falls on the Trump Administration and the tens of millions of Americans who voted for him with the explicit desire to change government’s focus.  To Rhode Island’s insiders, we MAGA voters are taking away the funding source on which many Rhode Island organizations built their expectations.  No market exists for what they produce that will generate an income for which the organizations’ employees will be willing to work, but in their minds, the problem isn’t that their product has insufficient value.  It’s that other political constituencies are selfishly withholding money from them or ignorantly remaining blind to the value they create.

This is not a sustainable model.  For a particular organization or industry, it might be worth the risk to rely on government grants while initial work is done to ensure a continual market in the future.  In the red economy, this is most often accomplished through loans.

But in Rhode Island, we’ve allowed state government to become so one-sided that the better part of our economy requires perpetual funding from high taxes on our local productive class and transfers from Americans elsewhere in the country (and in the future, through local, state, and federal debt).  We must reverse this approach.

Featured image by Justin Katz using DALL-E.