Robert O.C. Worcester
2008-05-05 07:00:00.0
Current rank: # 1,910 of 5,039

BALTIMORE -

A generation ago, under siege from the Maryland legislature’s taxes and regulations and impugned as environmentally undesirable, manufacturers quietly began leaving Maryland in great numbers.

Under their breaths, legislators consoled themselves about the loss of manufacturing jobs because Maryland was a magnet for those new, clean, high-tech, computer service jobs. Besides, the federal government’s expansion in Maryland since World War II was guaranteed and accelerating.

How sad but richly ironic it is that within a generation, with stealth late at night reminiscent of the stolen Baltimore Colts, the legislature heaped a 6 percent tax on those hallowed jobs. It would cause the flight of many, probably a large majority, of those jobs to other states.

However — and it’s a big one as silver linings go — Tom Loveland and John Eckenrode, co-founders of the Computer Services Association, lead a very unlikely reversal of the computer tax enacted in the 2007 special session. This is leadership to be imitated often in the future.

There was a time when a lobbyist made a stout argument with Maryland legislators by warning that a certain proposed bill would exceed that of surrounding states or federal government. This would put Maryland at economic disadvantage nationally and internationally, it was argued.

Sometimes this appeal was persuasive. Today it would be viewed as trivial. Even in those old days, the Maryland legislature fancied itself an especially bright political light. Today the legislature regards itself as a light unto the nations. The difference between the two periods is much greater than “Miami Vice” in the mid-1980s and “CSI: Miami” today. Increasingly, Maryland is the Aberdeen Proving Ground of bad ideas the legislature wants to export to every other state.

Here are a very few of the pockmarks on APG’s landscape.

n Removing authority of elected officials from management responsibilities and vesting it in unelected union representatives, a serious erosion of accountability and the democratic process.

n Regulation of bank interest rates, thus driving Maryland’s burgeoning credit card industry to Delaware.

n Eliminating business participation in political activities it preserved for unions.

n Extravagant benefits to the unemployed.

n Exorbitant mandates making health care unnecessarily costly, inviting the rationing and degradation of a state-run health care system.

n Forced payment of union dues by nonmembers.

n Granting government arbitrary rights to modify or cancel contracts affecting private property rights.

n Singling out one company, Wal-Mart, for punitive legislation, also leading to state-run health care.

n Legislation that singled out one industry — computer services — for taxation.

n Exorbitant and discriminatory taxation for one group of taxpayers — millionaires.

In 1986, Baltimore Sun business editor Phil Mohler wrote, “We have an economically illiterate electorate ... from which our elected officials are drawn.” As full-time legislators and those with government backgrounds replace pro-business Democrats (almost entirely), the omnipotence of government and contempt for business have grown and become cultural givens.

So, how will Annapolis do when it faces the colliding and unknowable costs of escalating health care (leaving no funds for anything outside of health care by mid-next decade); of grandiose global warming fixes for environmental mermaids in distress; crumbling infrastructure; run-amok education; and $40 billion delinquency in payouts in health care benefits for future retirees at the state and county levels?

Perhaps private-sector solutions will become the only viable alternatives and leadership will rise to the occasion. But, as Allan Bloom said in “The Closing of the American Mind,” “What makes that project singularly difficult is the disheartening expansion of trained ignorance and bad thought. For to put the matter at its baldest, we live in a thought-world, and the thinking has gone very bad indeed.”

Robert O.C. Worcester is president of Maryland Business for Responsive

Government (mbrg.org).