Tag Archive for MSU Extension

Cronyism, Michigan, Rent Seeking

So You Want To Be In Government?

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Why would anyone bother getting involved JUST because of a class?

Some folks think that citizen engagement is pitiful, so we are going to have classes on how to be engaged.

Let that sink in.  You are too busy dealing with all of the complications of life (jobs, family, American Idol), added to the complications of government (Taxes, zoning, naming of trail systems), and frankly, you have zero interest in managing the community budget.  Is there time left in your day to fully engage?

Unless Idol is cancelled, your box under the bridge falls apart, family members around you stop going to school, or stop getting married, or never need to go to the hospital, those few extra moments you are blessed with are precious.  That free time is becoming rarer as the more dedicated mini-Stalins take the reigns at all level of government. (yes, I purposefully avoided the ‘Hitler’ word. )

We are over managed by an out-of-control Federal bureaucracy, and our local governments have never been so in-your-face with private property rights deprecation in the history of our ‘conquered’ new world. (Columbus day wasn’t that long ago)  Dealing with what used to be the simplest of issues now requires a council meeting, permission, a check, and a rubber stamp.

But MSU extension has the fix.  Lets teach more dunderheads how to rule effectively!  The TC Ticker lays it out:

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Michigan, Philosophy, Rent Seeking

OK, So Lets See The Other Side

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pure-somethingToo often, your local government will have advocates of money-spending that holds out the promise of jobs, or some tangible benefit that can be presented in dollars gained back for the community.

The authors of such fiction typically seek to justify their own positions of employment within that community, and possibly within the government entity itself. Axiomatically however, all of them have a stake in the outcome of the requested spending.  They will be asked for, and then will present metrics, or a presumed study of return on investment (ROI) and typically the elected leadership falls for it hook, line and sinker.

A perfect example was during a consideration of funding for the MSU extension office in Grand Traverse County when I was an elected commissioner.  County commissioners were given plenty of reading materials by the MSU advocates to show us that for every dollar spent we would see a result of $17 in benefit to the county.  The calculations as it turned out were premised on a ‘guess,’ that was then multiplied by a compounding analysis program that is used by MSU intellectuals, that relies on ‘guesses’ for the input variables.

Go. State.   ..  Yay.

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