'Just Close the Roads'

'Just Close the Roads'
A New York Senate candidate embraces central planning. What year is this?
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, November 2, 2000 12:47 a.m. EST

GENEVA, N.Y.--Concern for children has figured big in this campaign season, and, I must confess, I have finally signed on. Watching the kids of this small city in upstate New York parade through the streets the other night in their Halloween finest--all those little ghosts and witches and Zorros, proud parents marching alongside--I kept wondering where in this wide-open millennium of high-tech, world markets and quick travel their dreams and desires might take them.

And that led to thoughts of another specter now haunting these parts: Senate contender Hillary Clinton.

Mrs. Clinton has for months now been emoting about the plight of the upstate economy and the outflow of people looking for better jobs than the local farming and some of the rustier industries can afford. A big piece of her platform is her desire to keep this upstate crowd--especially their kids--from straying too far from these down-home hometowns and heading off to bigger cities or maybe even other states. (That's odd coming from someone who has hopscotched far from her own origins, and who via Arkansas and Washington now proclaims herself an "immigrant" seeking work in New York. But maybe different rules apply.)

So it is that Mrs. Clinton has been attacking her Republican opponent, Rick Lazio, on the grounds that he has no "plan" to boost the upstate economy. Mrs. Clinton, on the other hand, keeps telling us she has very specific plans for "targeted economic help." And upstate is ground zero. But the history of Mrs. Clinton in particular and of human experience in general suggests it is more trick than treat.

Mrs. Clinton's message is that through some process--apparently unavailable to other mortals--she has figured out exactly what kind of jobs upstate New York needs in order to persuade people, especially "young people," to stay put. She knows precisely how many jobs this project should entail (200,000). And she knows exactly where these should be. Her campaign even offers a map and a chart--noting, for example, that over the past ten years Geneva's population has dropped 3.7% from its 1990 mark of 14,135.

To fix this, Mrs. Clinton has produced an elaborate plan for "entrepreneurial incubators" (whatever those look like) and "access to the latest technology" (whatever she decides that might be) and "targeted" tax credits--not for everyone, but for specific businesses that Washington might deem worthy.

There are two major problems.

The first is Hillary's own record, which hardly suggests keen insight into the ways of the American economy. Mrs. Clinton's one extraordinary success in business was her $100,000 profit on a $1,000 investment in the commodities markets back in 1978-79, subject of last week's column, and a feat so odd that that anything like it, if performed by an elected official, ought to set off alarms at about the level of an incoming missile alert.

Other than that, Mrs. Clinton's past credits include such ventures as a national health-care plan so huge and impractical that it collapsed under its own weight, her problems keeping track of things such as her own law firm's billing records, and details such as her own role in the firing of the White House travel office staff. Even Whitewater (assuming it was just an up-front business project) was a money loser. This is the woman who now wants to chart the future of the economy of New York state?

The deeper problem with Hillary's plan is that the real name for this sort of thing is plain old central planning--an idea one would have thought discredited enough by 2000 so that even Mrs. Clinton would see the flaws. Unless, of course, the aim is not to help the economy but to win votes by offering special financial breaks to a select crowd just large enough to put a candidate in a close election over the top.

Whatever its political basis, such a policy is not much help in the long run, and certainly not to those children in Geneva--a generation whose job market in theory should extend not to Hillary's chosen demarcations of, say, the city limits--but to the far corners of the globe.

The big secret of the so-called new economy, now powering American prosperity, is that it depends not on the plans of politicians, but on the creative abilities and efforts of individuals who are left to decide for themselves what businesses most matter and who are allowed to keep as much as possible of what they earn.

Most helpful to upstate New York would be a "plan" that aims simply for the lowest possible tax rates for all and leaves it to New Yorkers to sort out for themselves what kind of work they most prefer to seek, and where.

If Mrs. Clinton really thinks the job of a U.S. senator is to find detailed ways to make sure potential constituents stay put, she'd probably do better to follow the advice of a friend of mine who grew up in Geneva: "Just close the roads."

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."