One of the most fearsome monsters of Greek mythology was the hydra, a multi-headed serpent which grew new heads every time one of its heads got chopped off. Myths themselves are like hydras—every time you try to kill one off, new myths pop up. This principle was at work as I debated with correspondents on Facebook the meaning of the latest events in the saga of economic development in Stephenville, as old myths returned and new myths were being born.
A lot has happened recently on the economic development front. The first president of the SEDA board abruptly quit, as did the first executive director. The city council went ahead and approved tax breaks for the incoming Hoffbrau project, and one of the three city council members who voted against the tax breaks promptly announced he was dropping out of the race for re-election.
The departing council member was trying to be a mythbuster. According to reports in both The Flash and the “newspaper,” he voted against tax breaks for Hoffbrau partly for the same reason I oppose them—the lack of fairness to existing businesses produced by the city council’s aid to the new one. But he also noted two myths—he did not use the term “myth” himself—connected with the Hoffbrau case.
The first was that tax breaks were luring Hoffbrau’s parent corporation to Stephenville. In fact, it is reported, there were documents on record indicating that corporation was committed to coming here anyway, with or without tax breaks. Which makes one wonder—why is it being given the tax breaks at all.
The second was that paying big corporations to come to town means more business for their smaller competitors, even though those competitors aren’t getting the same tax breaks as the big guys. The now-you-see-her-now you don’t SEDA executive director had said she had increased the business of small companies in her previous city of employment by paying bigger competitors to come in. Yet our mythbusting city council member produced correspondence indicating that when the city paid the big guys to come, the little guys got hurt.
Discussing these matters on Facebook’s Erath County BREAKING NEWS, I evidently stimulated yet another new myth: For example, another correspondent supporting government intervention in the economy said that my opposition to favoritism was communistic. Yep—you read that correctly—evidently I’m a communist, or at least a socialist, for opposing aid to some businesses at the expense of others. She said: “Malcolm Lee Cross I do believe Russia tried your way of thinking..it was called socialism, then communism…it doesn’t work. This country is based on capitalism. If we don’t make this town attractive enough, a business will simply go elsewhere, where that town is willing to offer them incentives and make their money, no skin off their noses. But it will be a LOT of skin off our nose.” Never mind that communists and socialists normally advocate not merely government aid to business but government ownership, while I’m advocating less government and more competition. If today she tells us that free market capitalism is really communism, tomorrow she may tell us that night is day, black is white, war is peace, and freedom is slavery.
(By the way, I said that this lady’s argument that I’m a communist isn’t really all that new. I’m old enough to remember how in the 1950’s and ‘60’s it was common to call anyone with unpopular views a communist, but today it is more common to call those with unpopular views, at least on college campuses, a racist, a fascist, a homophobe, or an Islamophobe, so perhaps my critic should get with the times. But I digress.)
Of course, no discussion of economic development in Stephenville is ever complete without the myth that the city council, with me as its mastermind, drove—you guessed it—Lowes out of town. Never mind that Lowes told us BEFORE it asked for any tax breaks that the profit it expected to make in the Stephenville area was too small to justify a store here. And never mind that I was in the MINORITY of the council in voting against any concessions. According to my correspondent: “Mr. Cross last year I need building supplies, guess what I was told at 2 of our local hardware stores, YOU NEED TO GO TO LOWES. I guess the city should thank you for forcing me to take my tax dollars to another town.” Imagine that—thinking li’l’ ol’ me has the power to single-handedly scare off a multibillion dollar corporation from coming to Stephenville!
Well–I’m not going to rehearse my arguments that it’s unfair for a government to play favorites with local businesses by granting tax breaks to some but not to others and that government should neither pay new businesses to compete for old, nor protect old businesses from competing with new. Nor shall I ask readers to speculate on what might happen should the government decided to play favorites in other policy areas as well, say, by granting freedom of speech to some but not others, or civil liberties to some, but not others.
I’ll close (for the time being) simply by asserting that as long as we make policy by myth and not with facts and reason to inform us, the likelihood of bad policy which fails to achieve its objectives is greater, as is the harm it will do in the process.
Malcolm L. Cross has lived in Stephenville and taught politics and government at Tarleton since 1987. His political and civic activities include service on the Stephenville City Council (2000-2014) and on the Erath County Republican Executive Committee (1990 to the present). He was Mayor Pro Tem of Stephenville from 2008 to 2014. He is a member of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church and the Stephenville Rotary Club, and does volunteer work for the Boy Scouts of America. Views expressed in this column are his and do not reflect those of The Flash as a whole.
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