Let the Junior League be
The People vs. Government—a familiar clash
TUESDAY night’s meeting of Little Rock’s board of directors provided another example of how the old phrase, “We’re from the government and we’re here to help,” works out in practice. And why it’s so often used ironically.
After the Junior League of Little Rock raised $3.5 million to renovate the historic Woman’s City Club building downtown, city government set out to tell the League precisely what windows to use. There are various and valid reasons why those windows needed saving, mainly to do with the importance of historic preservation, but the League has shown it can be trusted to respect those reasons on its own. For the League is a group of builders, not wreckers. As its willingness to compromise on this issue has shown time and again.
But why did the city have the right to tell the Junior League what kind of windows it could use in the first place? Because years ago the city gave the League $20,000 in return for an easement on its building—or at least its facade. After lots of tedious negotiations, the Junior League decided to give the city back its $20,000 (plus interest for a total of $34,196) so the League could spend $3.5 million on its own building in the best way it—and not the city’s board of directors—decided.
When asked why the League had chosen to go it alone, the League’s president (Lindsey Gray) put it simply and concisely: “We don’t do city politics. We just want to get back to the community service projects we do and spending our time and money on that.” Amen.
There’s nothing like being free to make your own decisions in a free country. The Junior League has spent millions of dollars, countless hours, and lots of work improving Little Rock in countless ways, from starting Riverfest to renovating this landmark building. It has earned the right to make its own decisions, which have always benefited the community. It can surely be trusted to do so again.
What we have here is a classic example of why it can be a mistake to take government money when it’s not necessary, as it clearly wasn’t in this case. For once government decides it’s your partner, it may not turn out be the partner you want or need.
With all of the problems of aging streets and roads and sewers, and the need to provide any number of other basic city services, not to mention challenges like how best to handle crime and improve public schools, why should local government be getting involved in all the minutiae of which kind of windows to buy? One reason is that governments—local, state and municipal—have so much tax money to play with. Arkansas collects one of the higher income taxes in the country at 7 percent. It also has the second highest sales tax of any state in the country, averaging over 9 percent across all jurisdictions.
In Little Rock, property taxes are high compared to the rest of the state, with the school system levying 46.4 mills, the seventh highest in Arkansas. Yet six of Little Rock’s public schools are among the 26 poorest-performing schools in the state. There’s something rotten here, and it’s not those windows in the old Woman’s City Club building.
TUESDAY night, the city reviewed a budget that includes no raises for any of its employees only a few years after increasing the local sales tax. Meanwhile, the city’s tree-killers continue to chop down those stately old elms and other beauties all along Main Street. And call it Beautification or Creativity or some such catchword. Note that, out of the $1.6 million that will go into that effort, some $900,000 is to come out of federal funds. Which only adds to the federal government’s annual federal deficit, which totaled $483 billion last year.
If the federal government is spending close to $1 million on a few blocks of Main Street in Little Rock, think how many other such make-work projects are under way in the other 49 states. All on the public’s dime, or rather billions.
Yesterday the national debt hit $18 trillion, up from $10.6 trillion when Barack Obama first became president. Does anybody think we can continue to spend at this extravagant rate without inviting the next financial crisis- cumGreat Recession? Well, maybe our own Paul Krugman and other like-minded Keynesians do; they seem to believe the piper will never have to be paid.
What to do? The answer: Limit the size, scope, and spending of government at all levels. Keep it down to what’s necessary, and stop inviting everybody to charge everything in sight to Uncle Sam—plus the state and local governments eager to spend, too.
It won’t be easy reining in all these governments big and small and inbetween. But at least Tuesday night, the Junior League of Little Rock scored one small victory when it comes to limiting government’s excesses. The League just gave the City of Little Rock enough money to preserve its independence. So it can use its own money, time and effort the best way it knows how: serving the community.