Mackinac Center decries predictable outcome of the policies it promotes

by: Eric B.

Sat Aug 11, 2012 at 11:44:29 AM EDT

One of the drones at the Mackinac Center stumbled upon what she appears to think was one of those "Bureaucrats run amok and shut down a 6 year old's lemonade stand over public health rules" stories.

Okay, so first a quick lesson in local government ... each local community has a master plan on which its zoning ordinance is based. Both of these provide answers to questions from business owners where it will be appropriate, based on that community's culture and decision making, to site their business. This helps answer questions about why traffic corridors are the way they are, and where they can expect prospective customers to seek them out. If a business locates itself into a downtown area, it might join a downtown development district, which helps plan and implement ways to make that area more attractive to bringing in customers, and often involves businesses paying into a dedicated fund for improvements like landscaping and parking. That fund represents not the icy hand of government bureaucracy, but a decision arrived at by business owners using government as a central point for implementation. That's the entire point of government, by the way ... a central point to express the will of a community at large. It's not some nefarious "other" that if left unchecked sneaks into your bedroom and throttles you in the middle of your sleep.

Without further ado, your pro-business investment, pay your own way Mackinac Center at work.

The city of Holland, however, shut down the business 10 minutes after it opened, informing Nathan it was in the city’s commercial district where food carts not connected to downtown brick-and-motor restaurants are prohibited. The Mackinac Center’s coverage of the issue has drawn national attention.

Without knowing the specifics of this, what this normally means is that local businesses have their investment protected by an ordinance that requires potential competition to help shoulder the costs of improvements that make the entire district more attractive. It's not just like owning a McDonald's franchise and looking out the window to see someone with a hot cart poaching customers by undercutting your prices on barely-edible hamburgers. It's like a sandwich shop paying for a parking study and then paying to implement its recommendations, only to find one morning that someone has parked a pretzel cart between those parking spots you paid for and your front door, and selling his products at a price that reflects the fact that he's not sharing your costs. If you're a business owner who's sweats out his business plan year-to-year because he's operating on volume rather than margin, you can understand the purpose for this ordinance. If you don't actually have any experience dealing with private sector pressures and just work at a rightwing think tank that gets its money through donations (and not the precious, precious market), you go looking for the gubmint bogeyman under everyone's bed.

Won't someone think of the small business owner?

The real question, however, is why this family has to rely on a kid's hot dog cart to make the mortgage, especially with severe medical problems. The answer is that there used to be assistance for these people, but those programs have over the years been routinely whittled down at the behest of "think tanks" like the Mackinac Center, who say that cutting taxes will lead to greater opportunity and greater prosperity.

By the way, this doesn't mean that there isn't some common ground solution here that can't be struck that will help the family while also protecting an investment made by small business owners (in fact, let's taken it as assumed that everyone hopes this is the case). That, however, is a local matter to be worked out locally. What is notable here is that a supposeduly pro-business think tank has taken a position contrary to the genuine, real world needs and pressures of small businesses in its effort to always root out a government bureaucrat.