By:
Ryan Houck
December
14, 2010
Only
weeks after Florida voters tossed Amendment 4 into the dustbin of
bad ideas, Jane Healy has managed to misread the most obvious of
signals. In her column "Will Scott and Cannon play games with
growth?" (Orlando Sentinel, Nov. 28), she calls for new growth
controls in the midst of a devastating recession while neighboring
states aggressively compete for Florida jobs. Only Healy could
imagine that the 67-percent-to-33-percent defeat of Amendment 4
means that Floridians have an appetite for new
regulation.
From
an armchair seemingly stuck in the outdated attitudes of the 1980s,
Healy calls on Gov.-elect Rick Scott to form yet another growth
commission and urges the Legislature to extend the life of
Florida's renegade Department of Community Affairs - a bloated and
predatory agency that aspires to centrally plan major sectors of
our economy.
The
overwhelming defeat of Amendment 4 suggests that a majority of
Florida voters do not share Healy's opinion that more regulation is
the answer. Voters made that clear on Election Day by soundly
dispatching Amendment 4 at the polls and handing antigrowth
activists the most crushing defeat in recent memory.
In
"The Road to Serfdom," free-market philosopher Friedrich von Hayek
wrote that "the more the state 'plans,' the more difficult planning
becomes for the individual." Hayek's point is that government
efforts to manipulate the free market through central planning -
telling individuals what to produce and where to produce it -
create uncertainty and higher costs. These economic hazards invite
more central planning, creating an ever-growing, never-sufficient
morass of regulation that worsens the problems it is intended to
fix.
A
legacy of that misguided approach, the DCA has long since strayed
beyond its original planning purview and now meddles in issues
outside its jurisdiction. Less of a growth guide and more of a
growth nanny, DCA presides over a hopelessly byzantine planning
process decipherable only to the agency's technocrats and
incomprehensible to most of the small businesses and local
governments forced to navigate it.
Healy's
views and the DCA in its present form are relics of a
"Tallahassee-knows-best" mindset - a Soviet-style regulation scheme
that has no place in the highly competitive global economy of
today. As local leaders work to diversify our economy, attract
innovative industry and add high-paying jobs, it is past time to
drop the 1980s mindset with its emphasis on planning Florida's
economy.
It's
time to cut red tape, not create more. Policymakers should abandon
the DCA - at least in its current form - and let locals lead.
Taxpayers will pocket the savings, and job-hunters will reap the
rewards.
Ryan
Houck of Orlando is the executive director of Citizens for Lower
Taxes and a Stronger Economy. |
Paid political advertisement - paid for and
sponsored by Citizens for Lower Taxes and a Stronger Economy, Inc.,
610 South Blvd., Tampa, FL 33606
|
