A restatement of Waldo's view of economic development

The SC Policy Council is an interesting body. It styles itself a conservative critic of a conservative governing party.

Which means- at best- the SCPC is rearranging the Titanic's deck chairs.

As I've noted before, in politics, you can be one of three things.

The first is a candidate/office holder.

The second and third are a counselor and a prophet.

Counselors moderate ideas. They moosh them into a properly masticated pablum before presenting them to the candidate/office holders. There may be a spiky radical bit here and there but it's explained away as a little extra paprika in the recipe. Overall, there's nothing to threaten the counselor's standing at court.

Prophets foretell the future, and the devil take the hindmost. They may be wrong. They may be right. But the last thing they worry about is their access to the candidate/office holder class.

SCPC shows promising signs of prophecy but is hindered by the wish to sit close to the rulers. Take their recent paper of economic development.

Please, as Henny Youngman used to say of his wife.

It's a thoughtful- if ill-proofread-piece ("gaffes" not "gaffs") but it concentrates on what is being done wrong. That's classic counselor-speak.

Prophecy would be not just carping about the legislature's errors but laying before them an alternative.

That means an alternative that is shown to work, not just one that fits an ideological paradigm. If the latter's what a policy maker is looking for, s/he need no advice at all. Once you are convinced you already know all you need to know, you needn't know what anyone else knows.

The solutions to SC's economic development doldrums are not things counselors will want to say, nor office holders to hear. The latter not only want to pick winners and losers, but also to pick winners and losers whose fate will accrue to the benefit of the office holder's continued office-holding.

Thus the state's persistent fondness for 1950s-style economic plans that are, curiously, way more command and control than the present-day trimming at the edges adjustments that get one decried as a RINO- are. SC leaders love bribes of cheap land, cheap workers, and little regulation to attract one big corporate tenant every decade or so.

One community thrives, and the SC press wets itself to argue that the Palmetto State is, somehow, emerging from the muck to take its place in the civilized world.

Except it's the Henry Grady's "New South" world that ended a long time ago.

A new economic development policy means South Carolina has to do a number of things it views as a double dose of Castor oil followed by a liberal- we use the term advisedly- dose of livermush.

At its heart, such a new policy means accepting that SC has a crappy, inefficient, money-gorging school and university system, and a claque of  private universities more devoted to Jeebus, football and  fundraising than  turning out graduates who'll pay to keep the hamster wheel turning than to graduate independent thinkers whose thoughts might, from time to time, require thinking "liberal."

As in importing high-tech companies who aren't just looking for a dozen or so people to churn their coffee beans or keep the air conditioners.

As in importing the REAL value-added workers: people who think.

The trouble with thinking, of course, is that Thinkers contemplate ideas outside the orthodoxy. They are thinkers who concern themselves with How To Get Things Done, not just to How To Stay In Power and Keep the Darkies Grateful.

An openness to outside the boxers is why NC has the thriving Research Triangle Park and SC has to Innovista Empty Building Park.

SCPC has the ability to change the mindset in this state. They just need to divorce themselves from their perceived need to be counselors, not prophets, and do the real- hard- work of making the case to office holders that the right is not only the enemy of the good but the enemy of getting re-elected.