George Rebane

Virginia Brunini is heading up a petition drive to save state funding for our Empire Mine State Park.  She states that the state park accounts for about $10 million of imported cash into our local economy.  This initiative is backed by a number of local organizations including the ERC.  If you wish to support the effort and sign a petition that will be presented to the state legislature in the next couple of days, please go here.

The county and local agencies are all scrambling to write proposals to get as much as possible of the federal stimulus air drop of newly printed dollars promised by the Obama administration.  This entire program has been constructed as a ‘commons’ and should be treated as such by our local political and agency leaderships.  As Garrett Hardin taught us many years ago in ‘Tragedy of the Commons’, a commons punishes those who do NOT do their part in helping to deplete it – morally/ethically behaving people simply lose out.  (A short explanation of the details can be found here.)  The strategy for writing stimulus proposals to support the local economy is clear – increase the scope of every proposal, and ask for several times the money actually needed to do the job.  Everyone else will be doing that, and the feds know it.  They will push back appropriately, and if not, then rejoice and spend the money wisely.  The alternative is to strap on our moral laurels, and make do with less as others get their ‘fair’ share.

(For those who want to believe there is a way to avoid setting up a commons, Hardin offers a reasonable and ethical alternative which governments have shown an unusual ability to resist.)