The Washington media’s cognitive dissonance continues with regard to stealing taxpayer funds and land to build a baseball stadium. Marc Fisher of the Washington Post condemns the District of Columbia Council for—gasp—trying to find a cheaper alternative to the existing city-funded ballpark planned for Washington’s Southeast area. Fisher promotes the populist notion that stealing is good in some circumstances, but bad in others:
Yes, the deal with baseball is bad. By definition, deals with arrogant monopolies are lopsided. But the District did right by its citizens: By putting the stadium in a scruffy industrial section at the edge of downtown, the government maximized the chances that baseball would spark retail, residential and office development, building up the tax base to better afford needed services.Sure enough, investors are pouring hundreds of millions into that area in anticipation of exactly that scenario.
Now the council proposes to move the show over to a new RFK, ignoring the fact that neighbors there would go nuts over such a plan.
Yes, a new RFK might be much cheaper because the land, in theory, could come free. But those savings are illusory. A new RFK would engender zero development, making any public investment there unjustifiable. A $500 million public investment in Southeast will repay today’s taxpayers many times over. A $300 million ballpark at RFK would be a pure gift to the barons of baseball, using money stolen from taxpayers without the slightest hope of a return.
The “arrogant monopoly” Fisher refers to is Major League Baseball, but that label actually applies to the District government. Having lived in Washington for some time, I can assure everyone that baseball has never taken a dime of my money against my will; I cannot say the same for the city, which has a nasty habit of confiscating a nice chunk of my revenues annually. Baseball has never prevented any business from operating in this city; the same cannot be said of the city, which treats genuine economic growth as a parasite worthy of destruction.
Fisher’s key argument is that a Southeast stadium will eventually generate more tax revenue than the cost of the city’s initial subsidy in building the park. This is a strange measure of economic development—we’ll be able to confiscate more private wealth in the future! And, of course, Fisher never considers what other factors might spur economic development in Southeast—abolishing taxes and zoning laws would be a good start. His argument is carefully drawn to ensure the maximum amount of government intervention in the economy.
(Fisher also contends that there should be no private financing of the stadium because, get this, “the city can borrow money at lower interest rates” than non-governmental financiers.)
And then there’s the matter of the city confiscating private land to build the Southeast stadium. Under Fisher’s argument, this too is justified because by allowing the city to decide how land should be used, more tax revenues will be generated in the future. And we measure the success of “free” markets by the amount of revenue the state can confiscate.
Fisher’s editor headlined his column “Grinches Try to Steal Baseball.” The only thiefs that I see are the District government and its enablers in the media like Fisher.
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