Wisconsin has Problems with Entrepreneurs and Businesses

JSONLINE Community Columnist Al Smith nails it:

He joins an administration filled with hard-core ideologues and militant bureaucrats who view businessmen as the new kulaks, virtual enemies of the people whose wealth is to be expropriated in order to fund the endless expansion of the state.

The disdain is exemplified by John Wiley, the outgoing chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After having his budget increased lavishly every year, out of the pockets of many of those he apparently despises, his farewell oration was a virulent leftist screed against the very manufacturers who paid his salary all of these years.

The roots of collectivism run deep in the Doyle regime, and our governor seems to be taking a page directly from Vladimir Lenin. In the 1920s, the Soviet Union was stagnating economically. In a temporary move designed to get things back on track, the Bolsheviks introduced their New Economic Policy.

This was a temporary relaxation of the mindless confiscations and persecution of business, and, sure enough, unshackled for a bit, the surviving entrepreneurial class sparked an economic boom.

The policies of the current leadership in the People’s Republic of Madison have produced a mass exodus of business from our state. The looters in Madison have overseen the loss of 12,000 Wisconsin jobs over the past year whilst simultaneously expanding state spending, increasing fees and introducing a host of hidden taxes.

Faced with failure of such colossal magnitude, Doyle now intends to make life even tougher for those surviving companies by introducing a carbon trading system that will raise the costs of doing business in this tax and regulatory hell by several orders of magnitude.

The parting shot:

The real problem is that Wisconsin has come to resemble a vast Potemkin village, in which our beautiful scenery conceals incompetent and venal government.

Yikes.

What did the late Sen. Tsongas say when running  for President? You can’t be for workers but be against business? It doesn’t matter I guess. He’s dead and he never became president.

Wisconsin has a big problem. It is anti-business and anti-entrepreneur. This will at the margin keep financial capital away, and drive away human capital (homegrown, or external). The leftists mentality of our failed leaders is going to fuck things up. You know what their proscriptions will be then? More socialism, more Marxism, more State control. So, more decline is Wisconsin’s future unless it can escape this trap.