“Charles Manson stole this song from the Beatles.  We’re here to steal it back”

— Bono, introducing “Helter Skelter” at the beginning of Rattle and Hum.

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There aren’t many things in the world worse than someone – especially someone putatively in charge of you – claiming credit for your work.

All of Minnesota should be upset.

Fifty years ago, Minnesota was a sleeping giant.  Blessed with immense natural resources – taconite, lumber, agribusiness – and with huge advantages being the geographic, demographic and communications center of the upper midwest and upper Great Plains, Minnesota had been hampered by the same dynamics that hampered all rural Midwestern agricultural states.

Minnesota had communications – rails and rivers and roads – and a couple of big cities full of people and a huge land-grant university, located smack -dab at the confluence of America’s greatest river and one of her greatest rail nexuses.

Once communication and capital met, really, it’d have taken serious effort to keep Minnesota from prospering.

And Minnesota did, finally, prosper.  In the 1970s, the combination of brains, talent, communications and infrastructure finally moved Minnesota out of the “underachievers” category and onto the “overachievers” list.  Minnesota companies – 3M, Dayton Hudson, Carmichael-Lynch, Target, Sound of Music (now Best Buy), Musicland, Toro, Polaris, Northwest Orient Airlines, Control Data, Honeywell, IDS, Cray, Medtronic and a slew of others became the lynchpins of a regional economy that performed well above its weight.

Around that same time, the Minnesota Legislature – controlled at the time, we are reminded, by the Republican Party, in those days long, long before “Republican” meant “Conservative – instituted a series of programs that redistributed the state’s new, skyrocketing wealth from the parts of the state that had it – the cha-cha Twin Cities – to the parts that didn’t, the poor rural areas in the north and the the economically-lagging Iron Range and Arrowhead.  The reasons made some sense at the time, in a Keynesian sort of way; the Twin Cities, and especially their new, booming suburbs, were awash in money; towns like Virginia and Thief River Falls, presiding over eroding industries and smaller, less resource-rich populations, were sucking pond water.

Rolling in tax receipts as the regional and national economies both boomed in the sixties and very early seventies, the state launched a variety of programs – “Local Government Aid”, which redistributed money from the Cities outward and helped smaller, poorer areas of the state build better infrastructure, which made sense at the time, and an orgy of spending on schools and post-secondary education and infrastructure.

The national media, noticing the story of Minnesota’s booming growth at a time in the pre-Reagan era when people were still liable to attribute all good things in life to government, dubbed the explosion “The Minnesota Miracle”.  It even made the cover of Time Magazine.

Gov. Wendell Anderson

The message was fairly clear; Minnesota’s growth was due to govenrment.

Now, I’m not so dogmatic a conservative as to say that government had no role in Minnesota’s growth.  In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that, given the mentality of the time, Minnesota’s state government was a capable partner with Minnesota’s huge, growing, thriving business and higher education communities.

I’m a uniter, not a divider.

But that was then.

Now?  To the Minnesota DFL, what once were tools are now entitlements.  “Local Government Aid” has switched from being a hand-up for outstate Minnesota into a vehicle for laundering spending for the DFL; the Metro area and Duluth get 2.5 times more money per capita than the rest of the state, and many outstate cities get no LGA at all; indeed, some are opting to do without it altogether.  It’s become a political football and, worse, just another entitlement program.

And the companies, big and small, who were once the key partners in this growth?  Who invested billions in infrastructure to create jobs in this state?  They’re still here – it’s a nice place to live.  Taxes don’t necessarily kill big companies, or drive them completely out of the jurisdiction.  Just as companies remain in high-tax hellholes like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, the Twins’ big-ticket employers, the Targets and Best Buys and 3Ms keep their headquarters’ here – but are sending their new jobs and new growth pretty exclusively elsewhere.

And yet the media, and its DFL-allied shills and cheerleaders like Nick Coleman and Lori Sturdevant, keep pining for the myth of the “Minnesota Miracle”, where (liberal) government leads the rest of society into a great glowing glorious future with everyone Happy To Pay For A Better Minnesota.

It’s garbage, of course.  Government, at the most, was a less-useless partner, even then, at a time when there was still such a thing as a moderate Democrat.  Nobody can say the same thing about today’s DFL.

Minnesota needs a new miracle.

We need the kind of miracle that Jersey City, NJ had in the nineties, when a conservative mayor, Brett Schundler, slashed taxes and regulation and focused his city on growth, security and education on a responsible budget.  Jersey City throve.

We need the kind of miracle that Texas – with its conservative government and hands-off approach to the market – is having; most of the jobs that are being created in the entire country are being created in Texas.

We need the kind of miracle they have in North Dakota as we speak, where a conservative government is cutting spending and rebating excessive tax collections.  (“But they have an oil boom going on!”, the lefties whinge.  How many states with boundless oil are sucking budget pond water right now?  What was the bumper sticker in Colorado – “Dear Lord – thanks for another oil boom; we promise not to screw it up this time?”  How many states have squandered limitless oil wealth on entitlements and are begging for more today?  Can you say Louisiana?)

We need the kind of miracle that Indiana is experiencing today, with government tightening its belt and getting out of the way of a market that is growing even as those of its surrounding, Democrat-controlled states, are reeling.

Government doesn’t give us “Miracles”, at least not when it comes to free market economics.  Government, at its very best, screws them up less.

Do I believe Tom Emmer’s plan will lead to another Minnesota Miracle – a miracle of the free market?

If the time is right, yes.  I do.  And at the very least, it will do vastly less harm than the Horner plan, to say nothing of Dayton’s hare-brained “plan”.