Watching the CRI Sink Into Irrevelancy
Not that they were especially relevant in the first place. Their factually-challenged and ideologically-driven attempts to join the *debate* has largely been a flop, yet we find John Stapleford has been able to get more space at the NJ editorial page to try to sow their confusion to Delawareans.
Today’s missive wants us to know that we should be wary of Public-Private Partnerships. You should make a point to go read the whole thing, because this is a new level of mess from Stapleford. While I have no idea whether Stapleford is responsible for the title of the piece, there isn’t anything that Stapleford is attempting to critique here that counts as a real public-private partnership. Those are specific arrangements between a public entity and a private one to manage capital and risk to get something done. This is mostly done for infrastructure but there are other applications.
In any event, Stapleford starts with abit of nostalgia for a past Chamber of Commerce President who was skeptical of the creation of a Small Business Technical Support Center (but it happened anyway). And somehow this is meant to have something to do with the Chamber acquiescing to an increase in the gross-receipts tax a few years back. His point here is something of a real mess, but he glides right by two key things — one was that the state was facing a financial cliff and there were tax increases, program cuts and salary roll backs for state employees everywhere. There weren’t many Delawareans who weren’t hit by the effort to balance the budget. Credit to Jack Markell AND the Chamber for recognizing that everyone needed to share the pain.
The rest of his piece is too hard to really tease out any real coherent thread. He throws around more numbers that you shouldn’t expect to have any data quality. But if I squint and look at this sideways,it looks as though the academic Stapleford is trying to make us believe that the government as a consumer of goods and services in the economy is somehow not especially legit. Which is completely nuts — no matter what you think the government ought to be doing, it will be buying or leasing Xerox machines (and toner!), buying office supplies, buying gear for police, firefighters, soldiers and so on. A private sector company who has a contract to produce the uniforms of soldiers or police officers is hiring people, buying equipment and sending money into the economy. And the government as a consumer of goods doesn’t count as a public-private partnership. The government paving the road in front of your house or repairing the water main hires a contractor to do that and that contractor (his employees and suppliers) are delighted for the business. And most of them competed for that business.
This piece is worth reading for its sheer incoherence, really. There isn’t much of a point outside of a recitation of various ideologies not backed up by any data or even a real narrative. Shame that the News Journal keeps thinking that this is worthy of their editorial page. But apparently if you are in a *think tank* you are expected to produce *think pieces*. One day Stapleford just might do that — but not today.
A zealot, Stappy will not rest until clean drinking water costs $25.99 a gallon. If you listen to what constitutes an economic paradise from his perspective, it has a lot in common with Hati and Somalia.
He didn’t fight against the encroachment of government subsidies into the marketplace, I’d bet.
Which is another bit of incoherence from this guy — if you don’t want the government to be a consumer of goods in the marketplace, then at least call for the government to stop subsidzing businesses that are supposed to be competing in the marketplace. Subsidies distort the markets AND they rip off taxpayers.
BTW – You are so right about the thing being incoherent gibberish. From the jarring non-transitions, you get the feeling that he just pasted a bunch of sentences together.
I guess if the CRI editors see the basics, (taxation is evil, regulation is evil, governments only valid role is to further enrich the rich) they just stamp “okay” on any steaming pile of bullshit.
I actually have no idea what this editorial is about, I gave up reading it earlier this morning but I just tried to circle back on it just now. He goes from talking about the increase in the Gross Receipt tax (which was a non-sequator from his previous “point”) to some sort of discussion of alternative energy to a classic sentence where he starts with his approval of Vision 2015 and then ends with a totally unconnected statement about the Affordable Care Act. The term “rambling” does not do this article justice.
I understand that the CRI is suppose to be a Libertarian “think tank”, but traditionally, Libertarians have been strong supporters of Public-Private Partnerships as they believe that the private side brings in some market discipline and they see the partnerships as a step along the process of moving us towards taking government out of the marketplace. Apparently, for the CRI these Public-Private Partnerships is too much intrusion into their perfect vision of a laissez-faire marketplace (a world that only exists in their imaginary models of the economic world).
CRI lost whatever credibility it had left when they forced Shaun Fink out because he wasn’t “combative enough.”
CRI isn’t libertarian worth a damn — they are stone *movement conservative*. The whole point of that place is to try to move the political conversation here to the wingnut fringe.
And Stapleton clearly doesn’t know *what* a public-private partnership is if you take his piece seriously. Public-private partnerships do stuff — like build and operate infrastructure. It doesn’t include a CEO joining a government.
When you read stuff from CRI — you should imagine them writing in this.
Seriously.
(I never know about Fair Use with cartoons, which is why I didn’t repost it…..)
i was going to ask what happened to shaun at CRI! can you fill me in MJ?
Don’t you mean “Sink into Irrelevance”?
Your real question is whether or not the test to find the people who don’t have anything to add to the conversation worked.
Disjointed to say the least. Reminds me of an AM talk show when the caller bemoaned how the President shut down NASA. While not entirely true, the host neglected to mention that private companies have to compete in the new market,once the old market that taxpayers subsidized. CRI,Stapleford,Norquist and Jensen can k.m.a.
Cassandra, I’m going to use that as an avatar.
The State Chamber tried to repeal the gross receipts tax in 2005 and nearly got away with it. Tom Cook and John Carney helped stop that train. Alan Levin, State Chamber chairman, would have gotten a huge pay raise at taxpayers’ expense.
Phil – in short, Shaun was told he wasn’t being “tough enough or confrontational enough” on progressives and Democrats. This followed his “firing” by Curley at WGMD when Shaun had the audacity to say that there was no leadership in the GOP if all they were going to do is call their opponents names. So he quit.
I’ve always found him to be what I call a pragmatic conservative – he sees the same problems progressives do, approaches them from a different angle, but manages to meet those on the other side of an issue somewhere in the middle to solve a problem. That and he and his family are good friends.