The state of Michigan may refuse to subsidize the creation of an amusement park in Grayling for the for-profit Axiom Entertainment, according to the August 15 edition of Gongwer, a Lansing, Mich.-based political newsletter.
The director of the DNR, which was set to sell the company state land, laid out deadlines for the firm to either put financing together or lose the opportunity to purchase the property it required for the park. But this deal reportedly involves more than the sale of state land. In their article “Taken for a Ride” James Hohman and Diane Katz cite a Bay City Times report that the company was looking for $25 million in infrastructure assistance from Lansing.
The planned park would not have been the first to receive government assistance in Michigan. The first was “Autoworld,” the automobile themed amusement park that opened in 1984 and went belly up in less than two years of operation.
Autoworld was razed in 1997. You can see the video of the implosion, below.
The basic idea behind Autoworld was to create jobs in Flint, which had been hit hard by a downturn in the automobile industry. The general idea behind supporting a private amusement park with state resources — then and now — is the same: jobs, jobs, jobs. Indeed, Lansing politicians are so desperate to create the appearance of doing something about Michigan’s economic woes that “jobs” appear to have replaced “the children” as their rhetorical shield of choice. “We have to subsidize the park,” a Lansing pol might say, “it’s about jobs.”
The first thing public officials must recognize is that government has nothing to give anyone that it does not first take from someone else. Robbing Peter to pay Amusement Park Paul doesn’t create net new jobs, at best, it just shifts them around. What it does create are job announcements, which for politicians is the next best thing.
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