BUFFALO June 22, 2015 - A June 19 Buffalo News Opinion piece entitled, “Welcome new master plan aims at making downtown core more people-friendly” said this:
“Yes, continued development could happen by accident, but it’s dangerous to leave growth up to chance and likely to produce less desirable results.”
Wrong. Leaving growth up to the market is Buffalo’s only hope for escaping the economic blight that has plagued it for over a half century.
Let’s not forget what killed Buffalo in the first place: central planning by the government, which destroyed untold billions in waterfront property with wrongheaded expressways and disastrous public housing projects, built the Subway to Nowhere and generally taxed and regulated the economy to death.
The alternative to central planning isn’t “leaving growth up to chance.” It’s leaving growth up to the uncoerced choices of producers and consumers. Instead of government officials seizing money from taxpayers and deciding how it will be spent, consumers spend their own money as they see fit.
When consumers have choices, entrepreneurs face the prospect of losses if they produce products people won’t buy voluntarily. When the government plans and subsidizes, taxpayers don’t have a choice. They pay whether they want to or not. This steals capital from projects that can make a profit and employ people and leaves us with projects that need subsidies to survive.
