A NEW PLAN FOR MISSOURI'S ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Folks at the Missouri Department of Economic Development have big plans. Or make that a Big Plan. In the making, that is. Sometime like next June. Well.

Said Quentin Wilson, deputy director of the department, "We think government can work, can be run more like a business." Would that it were so. This kind of talk has been repeated so often in recent years that it seems, from politicians of both parties, an indispensable part of the political idiom, usually signifying the emptiness of that form of speech. Such hopes are nearly always dashed, but if the current pooh-bahs of economic development can prove the exception, more power to them.

Meanwhile, Missourians will not all be comforted by news that, along with this plan, the Legislature has turned over to DED "a lump sum of money and left it up to the department to decide in what areas the money should be spent." This sounds as though the state is entering a new era of industrial policy, in which government minions pick winners and losers in our free economy. Japan has long practiced such a system and its economy has recently been suffering mightily because of it. If you doubt this, ask yourself: What, exactly, is meant by the sort of "public-private partnerships" our friends at DED are constantly chattering about?

Missouri's economy will doubtless survive the latest plan from DED. Meanwhile, Missourians are right to regard it with the skepticism for which the Show Me State is rightly famous.