BUFFALO June 22, 2015 A June 19 Buffalo News Opinion piece entitled, “Welcome new master plan aims at making downtown core more people-friendly” said this:

“Yes, continued development could happen by accident, but it’s dangerous to leave growth up to chance and likely to produce less desirable results.”

Wrong. Leaving growth up to the market is Buffalo’s only hope for escaping the economic blight that has plagued it for over a half century.

Let’s not forget what killed Buffalo in the first place: central planning by the government, which destroyed untold billions in waterfront property with wrongheaded expressways and disastrous public housing projects, built the Subway to Nowhere and generally taxed and regulated the economy to death.

The alternative to central planning isn’t “leaving growth up to chance.” It’s leaving growth up to the uncoerced choices of producers and consumers. Instead of government officials seizing money from taxpayers and deciding how it will be spent, consumers spend their own money as they see fit.

When consumers have choices, entrepreneurs face the prospect of losses if they produce products people won’t buy voluntarily. When the government plans and subsidizes, taxpayers don’t have a choice. They pay whether they want to or not. This steals capital from projects that can make a profit and employ people and leaves us with projects that need subsidies to survive.

Having lived away from this city for ten years, I’ve been overwhelmed since returning at the extent of government interference in every economic decision. There is literally no new building or business initiative local government officials aren’t intimately involved in planning.

This is to some extent the natural result of taxing the daylights out of everyone and then offering tax breaks, perversely called “subsidies” in modern socialist parlance, to those who start businesses the government approves of. But Buffalo takes it to a whole new level.

After living and doing business in relatively freer places, I feel like I’ve moved back to 1960s Moscow. It’s abundantly clear why people are leaving this city to find opportunities elsewhere.

Most are familiar with Einstein’s definition of insanity: repeating the same procedure and expecting a different result. We’ve let government central planners kill Buffalo for too many decades. It’s time to try something new.

Let’s let the market decide what is built or not built in Buffalo. That’s what made America the richest country in the world. It’s what is rebuilding the places our young people are fleeing to.

We have nothing to lose but our fifty-year recession.

Tom Mullen is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? Part One and A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.