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Thursday, March 25, 2004

By Ralf Seiffe

State Representative Robert Molaro (D-21) appeared on the WLS 890 AM's Don Wade and Roma’s radio program as the sponsor of a bill in the General Assembly designed to outsource Illinois jobs and reduce our exports. His bill would appropriate one of Illinois’ most traditional businesses---a meat packing plant---and send the jobs to Texas or Canada.

The business in question is a horse slaughtering facility being rebuilt in Dekalb. The place burned down a couple of years ago and the Belgian company that created the jobs in the late 1980’s wants to bring them back. According to Jim Tucker, the project supervisor who appeared on Wade’s program yesterday, the business employs 30-40 people directly and indirectly supports many more by paying Illinois farmers and others for their livestock.

In Illinois, horsemeat is outlawed for human consumption but it is considered a delicacy in some European countries. So, because it cannot be sold here, it must be sent---exported---to other places. In other words, here’s a foreign country that’s invested in America’s Heartland to provide jobs, then sends the product overseas to help our country’s export situation and balance of payments. This seems like the very model for countering the loss of American jobs to foreigners and one we should do all in our power to encourage.

Apparently, Representative Molaro’s feelings are hurt and they are more important than the jobs and the exports. This Chicago Democrat usually concerns himself with swelling the public sector, sponsoring more than a hundred of the bills to, among few other things, increase pensions for public employees and hasten the payments tax sale scavengers must pay to government when they dispossess little old ladies.

Now he’s moved on to a higher calling. Molaro told the radio audience that horses had been a great source of power for the building of public works a century or more ago and that this was reason enough to spare them slaughter. Instead, the representative suggests that horses should be sent to glue factories where they will be drugged with a mixture of toxins similar to those used to execute criminals. Then, rather than exporting the meat to the Europeans, these carcasses should be turned into glue for construction, binding and, one supposes, the tasty stuff they put on the back of envelopes.

This is exactly the kind politician Mark Twain warned us about.

Molaro made no claim that the slaughter of horses is a menace and should be prohibited to protect the public from danger. He made no claim that the plant was inhumane. The method used to destroy the animal is exactly the same as is used for the slaughter of cattle.

It is apparently instantaneous, painless and subject to the supervision of an on-site veterinarian. And, it’s not as if Illinois has some limp-wrested aversion to packing houses. Those same public works Representative Molaro cites from the last century were financed, in large part, by the profits and taxes of the meat packing industry that once existed in Chicago and used to employ many from Molaro’s 21st district.

Illinois is in trouble because we trust politicians like Molaro to do our public business. They seem to have decided that the economy is a fixed size and that it is their job to grab all they can for themselves and their party. Instead of encouraging economic growth and the liberty that voluntary investment requires, these visionless politicians use the state legislature to coerce their will, to complexify the legal system and to make business harder. They seem deaf to the message they send that Illinois is an inhospitable place even for agriculture.

Molaro and his fellow “leaders” should stop passing “feel good” laws and begin using their considerable gifts to attract more outsiders who will set up plants and employ Illinoisans.

They ought to start right now because it seems Illinois’ biggest export has become its jobs. There are any number of stories of plants closing and sending work to more hospitable states or to foreign countries.

Yet, a cruise up I-94 or out I-88 shows that there is also a considerable amount of investment and jobs coming into Illinois, just like the packing plant in Dekalb. Foreign concerns with unfamiliar names top the new suburban office buildings that have replaced the machine shops and toolmakers that once populated the southwest side district Representative Molaro serves.

Until politicians understand this dynamic process and begin to act in ways that support it, Illinois will continue on its slow, long-term decline.

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Ralf Seiffe advises business start-ups and product launches from Chicago, Illinois and is a political analyst and columnist for the Illinois Leader.