Where does one begin to assess Steph Machado’s update on the development of the land that the government freed up in Providence by moving I-195? (“Development” might not quite fit, since 80% of the land is still available for sale.)
One approach is to think about your own life and all that has changed in the decade since the state government decided to go into the development business. In October 2011, I wrote on Anchor Rising that it was a mistake to try to run the government as a giant corporation, picking winners and losers and trying to conform land to a vision crafted by politicians and connected “stakeholders.” Between then and now, I transitioned from construction work to the RI Center of Freedom & Prosperity and now to trying to build something new and different. And still the “I-Way” land sits there, vision unfulfilled, with fulfillment nowhere in sight on the horizon.
An entrepreneur I know was offered free space in the Wexford building, which “most closely fulfills the original goal of the 195 District” according to Machado. She turned it down. The location and facility simply don’t suit her needs.
The government isn’t well suited to make these kind of decisions and investments, or to manage the projects. Trying to deflect from his culpability for setting the flawed plan in motion, former Governor Lincoln Chafee tells Machado:
Those sale prices are “ludicrous,” argues Chafee, who was governor when the commission bought the land and envisioned higher sale prices.
“We’ve only gotten a pittance of what it’s worth,” Chafee told Target 12 when reached by phone earlier this month. “Play hardball and get the market value.”
That’s not how any of this works. Government can “play hardball” only where it can force people to do things (which is why it’s dangerous to make it a giant corporation). “Market value” isn’t some hard number in nature that exists inherently in a thing; it depends on the value of the thing to potential buyers. You don’t play hardball to “get the market value”; you can only play hardball to drive the market value up when the thing is worth more to a given buyer than selling it at that moment is worth to you. It helps if multiple buyers all want the same property, which in this case means the government’s “vision” can’t impose too many restrictions on the visions (or the options for hiring builders, for that matter) of the people shelling out the money.
Instead, you get the current head of the 195 Commission Chair Bob Davis proclaiming in the news media for all to hear: “We want a lab building bad.” When that’s the case, yes, you might have to sell the land for as little as $1, and you’ll certainly flip the leverage around. The state is acknowledging that the land itself is worth less to some potential buyer than the development itself is worth to the government. That means the developer has all the leverage for hardball, to offload risk and extract guarantees at taxpayer expense.
Naturally, these games are much easier to play when officials can count on taxpayers to pick up the $10 million annual tab to pay off the debt that allowed the purchase of the land as an “investment.” As Machado reminds us, the government was able to issue the bonds for that debt without voter approval because they were structured as “revenue bonds.”
That means politicians locked the people out of the decision by pretending that they wouldn’t need to use tax money to pay it off because it would pay for itself. It also means lenders got a higher rate of return because of a (purely theoretical and actually fictitious) risk that the government wouldn’t pay them back if the revenue came in less than expected.
All around the boardroom, everybody makes out. Politicians get to sell favors and pretend to be savvy businesspeople. Investors get a boost for pretending that there’s risk. Union leaders get to promise their members that work is on the way. Any developers who were going to buy land in the area or whose projects are too risky to attempt without massive subsidy get a big break.
And you? You get to pay the bill.
Featured image by Bing Maps.
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Although regrettable, I understand the value of activity on social media. Still, watching folks build up audiences there gives me a low-grade dread. We know Big Tech deliberately suppresses conservative voices and on a whim will shut us down. That is why we have to open up multiple, direct channels that we control (as much as is possible) to communicate with each other.
As part of that effort, please take a moment to join our mailing list. The list receives a daily update of the posts on Anchor Rising and periodic (but not spammy!) announcements. Most importantly, it’s another way we can communicate if we draw too much attention and become a target.
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I’ve got to admit this trailer got me amped to see the movie, even though I had no idea this series was up to its fourth movie.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- School masking on trial
- RI politicians respond to Ted Cruz
- The mystery of Quonset’s people imports
- The puzzles of safe injection sites
- The state of play in a GOP gubernatorial primary
- A lottery to be the state’s pot pushers
Featured image by Edwin Lord Weeks on WikiArt.
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I mean, come on:
“It’s clear to me the civil rights of the defendant were violated by the D.C. Department of Corrections,” Lamberth said. “I don’t know if it’s because he’s a January 6 defendant or not.”
More importantly, the contempt order also directed the Clerk of the D.C. district court to transmit the order to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland for the Justice Department to conduct an “appropriate inquiry into potential civil rights violations of January 6 defendants, as exemplified by this case.”
If violations are occurring, it’s with the tacit (if not explicit) approval of the Biden administration and its “parents are terrorists” AG. Asking them to review these cases is a request for transparent wallpaper.
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The news is national that Rhode Island has become the first state to greenlight sites where users have heavy drugs can go to take them:
Rhode Island plans to create supervised spaces for users to inject illegal drugs, in a big test of the idea that reducing harm to drug users is more effective than criminalization.
The two-year pilot, a first for a state, would establish sites where users could also have drugs tested for potentially fatal doses of fentanyl, the potent synthetic opioid that drove overdose deaths to a nationwide record in 2020. …
Such injection sites allow people to use drugs including heroin and methamphetamine, under the supervision of trained personnel. In the event of an overdose, staff can administer the antidote naloxone. Advocates say the sites prevent overdose deaths and provide an access point to other services that can help prevent harm to users, such as housing, medical care and treatment.
The policy in this area is simply confused. Selling and buying these drugs is illegal. Carrying these drugs around is illegal. But if you can get to this one building, the government will test their quality and help you take them?
So what if a user, having spent money perhaps collected by begging or prostitution, shows up and learns that the government has declared this hard-won hit is too risky to allow in the safe space? If the government confiscates it, then users will stop going to have it tested. If the government gives it back, they’ll just go elsewhere. If the government replaces it or refunds it, then another step is taken toward legalizing it. Indeed, any of these possibilities — or just the fact of the injection sites — will create a bigger market, particularly in the area around the site.
A basic principle of economic and political theory is that the cheaper, easier, or safer something is, the more there will be. This is why easy access to contraception can increase outcomes like teen pregnancies (e.g., see here and here). While such likelihoods aren’t necessarily an argument against these policies, they suggest we might not be approaching the issue from the right angle.
Note progressive Democrat state representative Edith Ajello’s point that “the death of her best friend’s son to an overdose during the pandemic helped convince her that safe-use sites would help prevent deaths across the state.” Her assumption is far from obvious. If making drug use safer increases experimentation and decreases social disapproval, more people will take drugs, even if they don’t go to safe locations. The general social feeling about drugs will have changed without necessarily carrying with it highly specific information about where to do it. That will be especially true during a pandemic, when public sites will feel dangerous for other reasons. Will they even be open? Would we close movie theaters and sporting events but leave the door open for recreational use of hard drugs?
All of these questions scream that we must stop with the patchwork attempt to fix problems where they poke through and instead go back to the foundations of our thinking about drugs and the war thereon. Progressives in politics don’t want to do that, however, partly because their other policies are culpable, partly because the solutions might be cultural and conservative, but mostly because this is just a step in the incremental scheme to make hard drugs part of the growing organized crime wing of government.
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It’s important to mark findings like this so we can develop perspective over time:
The highly transmissible Delta variant of COVID-19 does not appear to cause more severe disease among fully vaccinated or unvaccinated hospitalized patients, compared to earlier forms of the virus, according to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
The CDC study, released on Oct. 22, analyzed some 7,600 patients hospitalized with COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, in the months of July and August, when the Delta variant became predominant in the United States. Researchers found that compared to earlier months, there was no significant change in hospitalized COVID-19 patients’ outcomes.
Of course, if more people catch a strain, then more people are available for a bad outcome, but when Delta hit, I heard of school nurses warning people that it was more deadly specifically for children. We need to be clear eyed in a tough situation like this.
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The perspective of a parent produces a different reaction to URI’s Media Education Lab study of “media literacy” in Rhode Island schools than the perspective of a policy theorist, although they can come together for a conclusion. An interview with lead researcher Rene Hobbs by Alexa Gagosz in The Boston Globe gives a good overview, but in brief, according to the study:
“Media literacy” means the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create and communicate using a variety of forms including print, visual, audio, interactive, and digital texts.
In other words, it covers just about everything having to do with communication through technology — from spotting “fake news” to leveraging new opportunities for media creation. Nine school districts in Rhode Island receive an A, with West Warwick receiving the only A+: Burrillville, Cumberland, East Providence, Foster Glocester, North Kingstown, North Providence, Portsmouth, Scituate, and Smithfield. Notably, those aren’t the obvious schools by ordinary top rankings or income level. East Greenwich scored a B-, while Barrington only received a C+. The only two Ds went to Exeter West Greenwich and Warwick.
Perhaps technology has been a way that middle-of-the-pack schools have sought to gain advantage, or maybe it has more to do with the chance hiring of a technology advocate in certain districts. The parental perspective might also factor into it, by which I mean a hesitance about more tech. Hobbs marvels that schools aren’t leveraging trends like YouTube and TikTok, but testifying as a parent, I’d say that increased reliance on technology was one of the worst parts of the pandemic lockdowns. Before COVID, we had a pretty good handle on controlling our children’s consumption of media in our household, but schools’ requirements for taking photographs of homework with cell phones, for example, on top of needing quiet space to be alone on a computer simply blew that up, and it’s a struggle to reestablish the rules. Particularly with government schools, I also can’t say I trust their judgement on appropriate material.
From the perspective of a policy theorist, I’m starting to wonder whether education is falling prey to the human tendency to respond to measurements and lists. How many topics do we expect schools to teach? Do kids need the basics most of all, or do they need certain specialized topics, like civics and “media literacy”? And what do we do about the apparent priority that schools are increasingly putting on social engineering topics like race and gender? These various priorities may not be mutually exclusive, but we tend focus on the one that some academic or special interest puts in front of us.
What we need is a thorough, rational, and adult public discussion about what education should be for, with a rank order not of districts but of priorities. Then we ought to pay more attention to things at the top of the list. If districts are utterly failing to teach math and basic literacy, then high scores in media literacy are only of passing interest, and we also must resist the urge to try to teach tech along with every other subject if non-techy solutions are better.
More radically, we might decide to mix things up completely. Maybe ordinary schools should be strictly limited to core subjects while other schools, clubs, and organizations take on ancillary and/or more mutable topics like “media literacy.” Perhaps, that is, our demand that schools be one-stop-shops for child development is at the center of their problems.
Featured image by Ludovic Toinel on Unsplash.
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Of course, having said the same for many years, I think that Newt Gingrich is completely right here:
Education is increasingly a policy issue which favors Republicans. …
The fight over school performance has expanded as the Big Government Socialists move on multiple fronts to undermine traditional learning. Honor programs are being eliminated, and grading standards are being weakened—or in some cases abolished. Radical values are being enforced as education is replaced by indoctrination. Critical race theory is being practiced, so that white students are told they are racists, and black students are told they are irrevocably oppressed. Long-accepted, scholarly history is being replaced by political distortion and exaggeration. Radical gender policies are being adopted—including allowing boys who claim to be female access to girl’s bathrooms and locker rooms.
Again: For conservatives, education is a rich fruit with a tough skin. You’ll have to explain. You’ll have to persuade. You’ll have to address concerns about the risk. But when you succeed, the payoff will be huge.
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Allen Waters tells host Richard August about his campaign for U.S. Congress and some of the issues that are important to him, to the people, and to this nation. These issues include but are not limited to school choice, corruption, the FAIRtax, 2nd Amendment rights, higher education, and matters concerning veterans. Waters is fiscally responsible, socially conscious, believes in traditional American values, follows the Constitution, and is a strong advocate for ordinary Americans. For more information: allenrwaters.com
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