BOONDOGGLS OR BOOMTOWNS- WINTER JOURNAL of INDIANA POLICY REVIEW

Click on the cover art below for your advance copy of the winter journal. We need your help keeping the quarterly journal publishing. Please consider a tax-exempt donation here.  An individual membership is $50 and a corporate membership is $120. In the Winter Journal: Boondoggles or Boomtowns IT IS WHAT YOU HEARD MOST during the recent municipal elections, and what should have troubled you the most: “I don’t know about the financing but I love what’s going on downtown.” In Indiana, that might be said about a new sports stadium, or a riverfront walk, or a convention center, or an entertainment venue, or a high-end apartment complex or a boutique hotel, or an ice rink — the list goes on and on, all with obligatory parking garages. It is known as economic development or eco-devo, enlisting local government’s help in the financing of downtown architectural splendor in steel, rebar and concrete. Gone are the dusty old office buildings and worn-out, failed commercial frontage, demolished as the city is freed at last from the chains of private property and risk capital. What could go wrong? Well, it could change your city’s democratic processes irreversibly for one thing, as well as change its very nature — all for the worse. The means of financing, or common sense should have told us, is critical to a city’s economic and political health. The participation of people putting their own property at risk for potential gain is essential for sustained development anywhere and everywhere. Indeed, some of us believe that protecting the right to own and use property freely is government’s most important job. For as influence in our cities shifts away from those actually creating wealth to those with merely the right connections, what is being created is not an enduring new downtown but a modern-day political machine, a regression to mercantilism. — Craig Ladwig in the upcoming Indiana Policy Review   Wednesday Whist | Waiting for the Pothole Rebellion (Morris) Cover Essays | The Cart Behind the Municipal Horse (Franke); Eco-Devo Done Wrong (Ladwig) Special Report | Does Indiana Tax Its Residents More or Less than Other States? (Keating) Schansberg | Socialism: They Don't Know What They're Saying; A Forgotten Man in Civil Rights; Who Are You, and What Did You Do With Elizabeth Warren?; All Lives Matter, Mr. Kaepernick Morris | An Unconcerned Vacation; Retirement Musings; Lefties Suffer the Military Salute; Searching for an IU Mascot; Municipal Voting for the Brave; Love Denied and Schooling Begins; Sophomoric Rule; Paths of Least Resistance; A Happy Birthday; The Andrew Luck Drama; Manufactured Crises; Squelching History The Bookshelf | The Noblest Triumph; Boom Towns; Emperor: A New Life of Charles V; World War I in the East; The Great Partnership (Franke) Backgrounders | Who Are You, and What Have You Done with Elizabeth Warren? (Schansberg); A Year Later and Indiana’s Conservative Movement Still Lacks a Political Vehicle, The NYT Has a Dark History (Moss); The Ukraine Catch-22 (Gaski); All Lives Matter, Mr. Kaepernick (Schansberg); Reparations: A Memorandum (Smith); A Callow Strike for a ‘Perfect’ Climate (Bisson); Religious Liberty, Constitution Day (Franke);  9/11 Amnesia (Claybourne) The Outstater | Education Reform: It's Time to Use our Outside Voices; Einstein’s Revenge; Help Us Get a ‘Foothold’; News by Algorithm; Public Safety and Race; The Test that Doesn’t Test; More ‘Bad Messaging'  The desktop version of the most recent journal can be shared directly by email, printed or downloaded as a pdf.

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