Dear Commissioners: Private Investment versus Tax Funded Waste (Dear Commissioners, September 8, 2013) | Eastern North Carolina Now

Gentlemen:

    Does this sound at all familiar?

    "Because the public sector does not allocate its resources based on economic criteria, it can and does continue to allocate resources to under-performing programs – so much so that poor performance becomes a rationale for additional resources."

    This is exactly the rationale that allowed the croney system of the EDC/C100 under the inept leadership of Mr. Thompson to waste taxpayer resources in a series of neglectfully overseen, unresearched fiascos. The county commissioners lack the expertise required for financial analysis and investment selection. The investment selection process invariably devolves into favoritism and political posturing. Taxpayers end up funding the schemes and pipe dreams of businessmen who have chosen to invest in political relationships rather than privately fund their own businesses. The taxpayers of Beaufort County have been conned into tolerating reduction of their own private earnings to supplement the corporate coffers of local business that are losing market share and shrinking in size.

    Look at your investment record as commissioners. It is abyssmal. It goes beyond ridiculous. It stinks! Please, quit committing local tax dollars to failure. Grow a spine and start saying no to corporate handouts.

    Economic development can use state grants to help Beaufort County recapture state taxes sent to Raleigh and it can act to remove regulatory and tax barriers to investment, but it cannot presume to act as an entrepreneurial entity. Local taxpayer grants and guarantees distort and disable the incentives and penalties required to properly ration investment flows. Private investors must be at risk on their own money if the discipline of the market place is going to work.

    Nobody spends his neighbor's money as carefully as he spends his own.

    Regards,

   Warren Smith
     Beaufort County, NC         Despite liberal rhetoric to the contrary, government does not invest, it simply spends. With another fiscal showdown looming expect to hear a litany from the left labeling federal spending as “investment” and as the reason why it cannot be cut. Don’t believe it. At no stage of the process does public sector spending resemble private sector investment. .....

    Losses in contrast flow immediately back to the taxpayer. Because the taxpayer does not freely choose to “invest” his resources with the government in the first place, the money will keep on coming, regardless of how it is spent. Because the public sector does not allocate its resources based on economic criteria, it can and does continue to allocate resources to under-performing programs – so much so that poor performance becomes a rationale for additional resources. While the private sector allocates resources in a pro-economic way, the public sector distributes them in an anti-economic way. Not only is the process of obtaining, determining, and investing private and public resources different, the outcomes from the two processes are diametrically opposed.

    Government does not invest in any sense of the word or replicate any stage of the private sector invesment process. Government just spends. ......

    In short, there is nothing more opposed to true investment than government spending. This is not to say that America is not in need of more real investment, just that government is not the entity it needs to do it.