Good Business Good Neighbor

What do expect out of a company wanting to set up shop in your community? In Jefferson County the simple answer, if you’re a Republican, is ‘jobs.’ Often it’s the only answer, sufficient to end all other conversation.

If you’re a Democrat, ‘jobs’ is only one part of a more thoughtful answer. You’re concerned, among other things, about what the impact the newbie could have on your wider community, not just the benefits for the people getting the jobs. The positions boil down to how you as a voter balance out the benefits and the downsides of the new kid coming to town. What kind of neighbor is the kid going to be?

Too often in West Virginia, even here in Jefferson County, we’ve neglected to look at the potential dark side of bringing in new commercial neighbors. Our leaders have gone ahead and opened our arms to businesses that a majority of our residents have regretted. We’ve welcomed in businesses that have had no intention of being good neighbors. They’ve taken up residence here only for the advantages they could get from tax breaks, from cheaper land , from affordable labor, from available resources, from ready access to out of state markets.

It seems too often that these companies feel they’ve fulfilled their obligations to the community just by supplying jobs. When conditions favorable to them change, they pull up stakes and head out.

Taxes get inevitably sited in the crosshairs of the argument. Republicans, who have a phobia about taxing, especially on businesses, will do whatever is necessary to minimize tax obligations — or tax burdens, as they call them. Our leaders will offer tax incentives to new businesses, pay for essential startup costs, defer tax payments for five or ten years, make excuses for business mistakes, look the other way.

The cumulative effect of these anti-tax policies creates a sense of entitlement among business owners. They feel taxes are for others; they’re doing all they feel necessary just by providing those “good jobs.” By good, of course, they really mean what’s good for business — profits before people.

Democrats take a different attitude. We believe that new businesses should see themselves as good neighbors. Our word good means supportive, respectful, contributing. It’s tied up with the notion of sharing, being there, making things better than you found them. Definitely not making things worse. To avoid those worse possibilities, Democrats believe in regulation, setting guidelines, and paying a fair share.

In the larger economic scope of things, it comes down to the idea of progress. Republicans worry about a community hurting itself if it stands in the way of economic progress. Democrats worry about a community hurting itself if it ignores the realities of doing business in America.

America is a capitalistic society, so much so that we’ve put an elephant on one side of the teeter-totter and an individual citizen on the other. We’ve demonized the word socialism, which, rightly, is a way of saying that shareholder profit is just as important as a community’s well-being. By putting profits before people, we’ve created a millionaire and billionaire class who have come to believe that they are smarter, morally superior, and more important than those who are not. They have come to perversely believe that a million, even a billion, dollars is not enough — not nearly enough. In fact, they will never have enough.

Now, obviously, a new businesses coming into our community, here in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia, is not likely to be run by a billionaire. In fact, we’re one of only two states in the country that has no resident billionaires. Not one. We’re lucky in that respect because the new business owners coming here are more likely than not to fall within the good neighbor category. They’re not here to exploit; they’re here to help.

That said, we certainly have some wannabe billionaires in the state, as well as out-of-state billionaires who eye us for what they can take from us. We have been at the mercy of those takers for essentially all of our history as a state and it still continues.

Here in Jefferson County we have companies wanting our land to produce energy to send to Virginia’s data centers. We have companies wanting our water to bottle and sell out of state. We have companies wanting our roads to serve their out of state customers. We have companies wanting to swap our orchards and farm land out for industrial development.

Jefferson County is primarily rural and uncluttered. It is a beautiful tourist destination. The progress we want is tied to keeping the county the way we prefer it. We citizens have to have a say in what happens here and we’re more likely to have that say with Democratic leaders.

Jim Bauman