If you live in Portland, Oregon, with unemployment exceeding the national average — in fact, over 10% — and one of the weakest economies in the weak but “green” Pacific Northwest, do you vote to:
- Revisit your “green” policies in light of how they further weaken the economy and increase unemployment;
- Ignore the problem and pretend everything is fine;
- Stress your city’s “greenness” and imagine that more of same will produce different results;
- Use a delightful combination of 2 and 3.
As Joel Kotkin writes on Forbes.com, despite the rest of Oregon’s voters opposing green madness and the obsession with “community friendly policies,” you select option d), and to finance it, you vote to tax the snot out of wealthy people and companies. Of course such actions convince companies who would have come to your state to, let’s see, stay away. But you don’t pay attention to such capitalistic drivel. Kotkin cites proof of Portlanders’ blindness to reality.
Portland may have high unemployment, but the big idea around city hall is not how to promote jobs but about investing an additional $600 million in bike lanes.
The greenie weenie mentality. The hell with fostering the prosperity it takes to maintain the quality of life you care about so much, give us more bike lanes! The Pacific Northwest’s eco-friendly echo-chamber has no use for economic law.
A growing green job sector needs a vibrant economy that produces things and builds new buildings, notions that have little currency across much of the region.
“Currency?” Who needs currency? Portland has “quality of life” — that is, if you ignore the crowds of homeless kids in the ever grungier downtown. Pile onto the economic woes of “green” cities like Portland an increasingly stringent set of “green” building codes that make building or renovating prohibitively expensive and you get a recipe for even crappier times. And what do you get for your greenie weenie zealotry? All area growth in home building moves to Vancouver, Washington.
Kotkin notes that Portland’s economic descent…
…may not be all bad. As America’s population grows and other regions rise, perhaps it’s helpful for the various parts of the country to experiment with different systems. Short of civil war, there’s something to be said for relentless, even if sometimes daft, experimentation at the local level. The rest of country may not follow all their strictures, but our would-be Ecotopians could produce some interesting and even usable ideas.
Thank you Portland. While you daft greenies go down the economic tube, the rest of us will learn what not to do.
