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:: Archive: Editorial / March 2004 :: | ||||||||||||||||
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In
a provocative piece in last month’s Wall Street Journal entitled,
“Stop! Is Not an Option In the New World,” columnist Daniel
Henninger makes the case Henninger
writes: A few years
ago, for example, we spent our evenings watching cable’s soundbiters
fight Henninger goes on to argue that the easiest things to stop in the 21st century world of “proliferation” may be “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” Harder, perhaps impossible, to stop is the spread of ideas, and the culture that emanates from those ideas. He concludes by saying “This is not a veiled call for global government. Local traditions matter. It is a call for abandoning the last century’s solutions. ‘Stop’ won’t work.” So what does this column have to do with Oregon, and especially its largest city, Portland? Well…almost everything. The intent of the “planning agenda” sponsored by the city (Katz) and the region’s leaders over the last 20 years has been to create a state and metropolitan region where “things look different here.” How different? Well, if you live here, you know the mantra—all too well. And so it goes: Oregon is the only state in the nation with a centralized European land-use system …one of only a couple of states with no sales tax …one of just a handful of states with a non-centralized higher education system …and Portland …Portland is the only metropolitan region with an aggressive utopian regulatory climate that numerous homegrown companies continue to flee …Portland is the only major American city that wouldn’t take part in the “war on terrorism” …and Portland is the only major city to actively make war on the automobile. But, of course, things do look different here. Translated: A Big STOP sign from Portland to the new century of globalization. Now, following Henninger’s argument, that big STOP sign might have worked in the last century. In the last century an isolated oasis away from “the maddening crowd” might have survived–although, maybe not even then. Case study: In 1933, Eleanor Roosevelt, a proponent of public ownership, convinced her husband, the
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president, to create a town in American that was communally owned. One year later, Eleanor Roosevelt created the town of Arthurdale, West Virginia with 165 new homes on 1200 acres to be inhabited almost exclusively by government workers. “Things were supposed to look different in Arthurdale.” Years later social critics would call Arthurdale the worst run city in America and its residents would beg to be freed from “communal” living—and Franklin would direct a mild ironic eyebrow of “I told you so” disdain Eleanor’s way. If a region or a state couldn’t really go its own way in the last century, now in the new “global” century there is no forgiveness for putting up STOP signs to economic progress. Why? Because as many important decisions that will affect the future vitality of our region are being made in Asia and in Europe as are being made in Portland’s City Hall. Governor Kulongoski can depart on an ambitious sales trip to Europe to convince German companies to expand their production in Oregon, but, at the end of the day, German business leaders will only decide to do business in our state if “Things Don’t Actually Look Different Here.” That STOP sign that Portland and Oregon have erected against globalization is not one-way. It’s two-way. And world business leaders know it. Henninger writes of the disruption globalization can and will cause: In India,
U.S. jobs arrive at Bangalore call-centers, and after 20 paychecks, young
Indians act and sound like Americanized yuppies, enraging their parents.
Everywhere, newly arriving Africans, Latins and Asians disturb ‘local’
cultures already beset by invasions of mass-market culture, most of it
exported from the U.S. China attempts to control the alien ideas pouring
in through Web portals, even as its pirates copy American movies, CDs,
and financial software. The returns of that philosophy are in. The “planners” have been routed. As each new day of the new century passes, the power of “globalization” gets stronger. To not be on board, to not compete, means getting left behind, and that means being poor. Portland and Oregon could have a better future.
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