I missed commenting on a number of things while I was in Cooperstown (and Buffalo and Pittsburgh) and with the busyness once I got back. I did want to comment on one of the many brouhahas that happened while I was gone, though: the Chick-fil-A controversy.
You remember the story. The president of ChicK-fil-A spoke out in support of the idea that marriage should be between one man and one woman,* at which point local officials in places like in Boston** and Chicago said that they did not want any Chick-fil-A’s in their towns (or wards) and that they would use their permitting, etc., powers to make sure Chick-fil-A restaurants couldn’t get in.
While it was an alderman who first told Chick-fil-A to stay out of Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel agreed, saying that “Chick-fil-A values are not Chicago values.”*** When I heard about Mayor Emanuel’s comment, my first thought was that it seemed like there was a First Amendment problem in what he was saying, which there is.
My second thought was that nobody should be surprised by Mayor Emanuel’s stance – because he had done it before. Back in May, Mayor Emanuel apparently stopped his efforts to help get public help for reconstruction of Wrigley Field because of media reports that Joe Ricketts, the father of the four siblings who own the Cubs, had listened to a proposal that he sponsor some anti-Obama ads mentioning President Obama’s former minister, the Rev Jeremiah Wright. Joe Ricketts didn’t fund the commercials, and his daughter Laura is a prominent Democrat, but that didn’t matter to Mayor Emanuel. He stopped returning phone calls from the Cubs, saying basically that if you support candidates I don’t approve of, or if you support them in ways that I don’t approve of, the City won’t help you. And nobody cared. The media all acted like what Mayor Emanuel did was perfectly okay and that it was the Cubs, or at least, the father of the owners of the Cubs, who was at fault.
I understand that the Cubs’ situation is different than keeping Chick-fil-A out in that not helping the Cubs involves a discretionary act by the mayor, not something as ministerial as issuing a building permit or a minor zoning variation. But the underlying point is much the same: the use of city power/money to encourage/threaten people to support certain political candidates/views.
While Mayor Emanuel’s sudden refusal to help the Cubs is not unconstitutional, unlike trying to keep Chick-fil-A out, Mayor Emanuel’s actions are yet another reason why government “help” to private businesses is a bad idea. Sometimes government money goes to friends or campaign contributors (“crony capitalism”). Other times, like in the case of Mayor Emanuel and the Cubs, companies don’t get the help if the politician in question doesn’t like the way somebody supports the politician’s political opponents. The bottom line is that politicians can’t be trusted with this kind of discretion because too many of them will abuse it. And the best way to stop the abuse is not to pass more rules trying to prohibit it. Instead, it’s to not have government do those things in the first place.
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* Like Barack Obama in 2008 when he was all about hope and change.
** The mayor of Boston later recanted.
*** Hal Dardick, “Alderman to Chick-fil-A: No deal,” Chicago Tribune, July 25, 2012.
Update (8/5/12 12:05 pm): Fixed a typo in the third paragraph. (8/5/12 10:30 pm): Inserted a missing word (i.e., "politician") in the third to the last sentence. (8/6/12 3:12 pm): Corrected yet another typo, this one in the first line of the second paragraph.
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