Where we Liberals dropped the ball

Swamp wisdom

It pains me to pontificate on this, but it needs to be done.

In New York we call ourselves the “Empire State.” This legacy of self-congratulation has created the wretched state of Upstate.

Basically the problem is that in our efforts to fix problems of social justice and the environment, we created a vast array of government programs and regulations. We allowed our outrage at some disreputable businesses to shape our efforts, with an end result that we made our new laws “anti-business.”

We assumed that our economic strength was so great that this did not matter. We assumed that no matter how vindictive our regulatory climate was, there would be enough wealth to make up for it.

We were wrong.

I am not for a second saying that we need to roll back the clock and trust business to regulate itself. This has been tried before, and the results were disastrous. What I am saying is that we need to change the tone of our regulatory climate.

We need to start with the guiding principle that people who run businesses are not evil, nor are they angels. They are just people trying to make a living like everybody else. We need to recognize that if all the businesses close, there will be nobody around to pay for our wonderful social justice programs.

I would suggest that perhaps what is needed is a strategy whereby we increase the number of watchdogs, and decrease the cost of compliance. To keep everyone honest we need to make penalties for breaking the law truly punitive. Punish the bad, reduce the cost to the good.

This is a problem that is much bigger than New York. The solution is national, and perhaps international. It is time for us all to be pro-business, as long as we never ever forget to be pro-citizen first.