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Feb

10

Caliguiri Whoop de Doo…

February 10, 2008 |

I read with some humor David Caliguiri’s Opinion 250 response to Chad Herman’s comments in the Post Gazette from last week. (For those who don’t know, the PG is running its Opinion 250 to encourage ideas about Pittsburgh’s future at its 250th anniversary…)

Caliguiri’s intends to build on Herman’s comments — which meander around the greatness of Pittsburgh past and its vast, but untapped future. I figured I’d hit on a few of the ex Mayor’s son’s comments for some real critique to what amounts to nothing but the same old, tired “progressive” Pittsburgh thinking.

Says Caliguiri:

” It is well known that Pittsburgh’s pension fund doesn’t match our pension liabilities, so why don’t we band together and storm the halls in Harrisburg and demand a fair solution? When my father was mayor, that’s exactly what he did. It’s time to demand sensible, progressive reform out of Harrisburg that will help Pittsburgh solve its pension crisis. It is not too much to ask Harrisburg to give us the tools to address this problem. “

Storm the halls of Harrisburg and “demand a fair solution?” What do the other taxpayers outside of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County owe Pittsburgh for its inability to manage itself prudently and balance its own books? What does some taxpayer in Altoona or State College owe to our region’s voters, who never met a free handout or big government union contract they didn’t like?

Mr. Caliguiri’s father might have been able to get away with stiffing the taxapyers of other regions for Pittsburgh’s wasteful ways, but that’s immoral. That’s spoiled child politics — spend yourself into oblivion and demand daddy bail out your butt? This is the mentality that has bankrupted this region, and one that sends businesses and bodies heading for elsewhere.

Can’t afford it? Too bad!

“The inefficiency of the Port Authority is a problem that must be addressed, but we should also consider what other cities and states already seem to know — that a strong public transit system can boost your economy. Let’s now plan how to extend our light-rail system to Oakland and the airport and how to pay for it. It’s not too much to ask, we just need to come together and make our demands heard by those that we elect.”

Let’s start by breaking the monopoly of the Port Authority and forcing it to pay its own way. You wonder why the dang thing is bleeding with inefficiency? Why its contracts and pensions can’t seem to make ends meet? Its a free lunch. They don’t exist! They yank money out of the functioning economy to subsidize bloat and graft and that which is not productively contributing to growth. Get out of the way, let the free market compete in taxis, buses, and trains. End all monopolies both public and private!

Continues Caliguiri:

Our outdated tax structure needs to be reformed to increase the livability for our residents and the economic competitiveness for our businesses. Why don’t we begin by creating a practical approach to what regional governance might look like? And while we’re at it, let’s cut the state corporate taxes that drive away our jobs…

The first sensible words of the piece. And yet we have this central-planning thinking follows:

…and explore every efficiency possible so that more of our limited resources are put to making every neighborhood more livable. It’s not too much to believe that we can create jobs here in Pittsburgh and improve the quality of life in our neighborhoods.

We don’t need more people in high places determining what jobs need to come, and how the neighborhoods ought to look. Chad Herman was all over that, quoting the great David Lawrence as if he made the city great. In case you didn’t notice, Renaissance I heralded a lot of action that lead to the decline of many neighborhoods, including the cauterization of the Hill District from Downtown. If he was so great, why did we need Renaissance II by Caliguiri’s father — which itself was another visual feast, but if we measure its success twenty years later you find more and more businesses closing shop and citizens heading elsewhere. The City was as bankrupt as ever by 2002.

When will we learn “if you build it, they will come” does not work when centrally planned?

Continues Caliguiri:

We all love our city and want to reclaim our stake as truly the most livable city in America. Remember, Theodore Roosevelt said that Pittsburgh gave a lesson to the rest of the United State because our actions spoke louder than our words. I believe that our time has come when we can once again teach the rest of America how to rebuild a city. I am confident that this same desire compelled Mayor David Lawrence to see Pittsburgh through Renaissance I and guided my father’s vision for Renaissance II. But now it’s our turn, so what do we do?

Roosevelt’s words were about the private initiatives of the City of Pittsburgh, not celebrating any centralized planning initiatives! In so far as Caliguiri is suggesting we cut off the local politicians from further driving the region into the ditch by confiscating the property of some and redirecting it to whomever they anoint, I’m all for it. But City Hall had nothing to do with what made Pittsburgh great 100 years ago.

No, back then it was free thinking leaders who were unbridled by meddling government middlemen. It has been those meddlers who, over the next 100 years, mastered the art of redirecting capital investment and grwoth away from compounding in the productive sector where it would naturally stay. Instead, these central planners worked to ply more and more resources from the engine of wealth creation, redirecting it to the politically connected — to special interest business deals and to special interest, uncompetetive (absent the force of government) labor. This newfangled “progressive” Pittsburgh that emerged as the 20th century moved on has led the country down the path to where we are today: a Country that cannot afford to buy what it makes because too many are parasitically bleeding their hosts dry / driving the costs into the stratosphere.

That said, I’m very leery of Caliguiri’s “we” since it sounds like just another version of the last 100 years of ever increasing collective thinking, which has done very little other than slowly bleed the region of its productive life, trading it for unfordable agreements with local labor and lots of debt. Who are we trying to kid here?

Continues Caliguiri:

Perhaps the real answer is that it is up to all of us, collectively, to lead Pittsburgh to our next Renaissance. I know that our best days are still in front of us; the only question that remains is who among us has the courage to take action and lead the way. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

Yes, it is up to all of us. But not a “collective” in any sense that it is led by some centralized authority who gets to force centrally planned solutions down the throat of those of us who have our own, private ideas of how to grow the regions. (Need we more Allegheny Centers or Lazarus deals??)

For that matter, it should not be any solution that pushes the tab for our pipe dreams onto innocent taxpayers elsewhere across the state. Nor the Unionized “punch in and out”, don’t do more than your job description / entitlement mentality that gifts hard earned resources to politically connected businesses and labor.

The leadership we need is the kind we never get: those with the courage to say “enough is enough” with the free lunches and central planned redistribution that is killing the region, but feeding a gargantuan parasitic infrastructure.

Too bad that ain’t gonna float any time soon. History shows that those who seize control of the political apparatus always bleed it dry. They’d as soon turn the region into a Third World kleptocracy as turn over their power and restore it to the individual citizens of the region. Only when they can’t keep going to Harrisburg or elsewhere to paper over their waste and corruption will local taxpayers and voters who support such garbage finally be faced with looking in the mirror and paying for their own lousy voting records.

Then, and only then, will they be left facing reality. Hopefully there will still be enough sane, free thinking go getters left in the region to restore order at that point, as this corrupted central planning parasitic class is no better than ex Soviet State socialists — where the people have forgotten how to not fleece others for their benefit, and never understood the importance of free markets, private property rights, liberty and freedom, to the creation of real wealth. They only know how to leach.

That much Pittsburghers of the late 1800s understood. I’m sure Teddy Roosevelt did, as well.


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