Thanks to the Fairborn Daily Herald and the (Xenia) Gazette News-Current for publishing the following letter to the editor on Tuesday August 25, 2009. (The article by Gery Deer to which I referred in the letter was published in those newspapers on Thursday August 13, 2009. It can be found at here (http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2098545/back_to_the_future_again.html).
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Dayton area doing nothing to nurture our innovators
Gery Deer is exactly right. The Dayton area IS putting all its eggs in one basket again. “The City Of A Thousand Factories” has become “The City Of Monolithic Bureaucracy.”
Not only is the Dayton area putting all its eggs in one basket, the basket is not even locally owned! Everything the local leadership is doing is making the area completely dependent on the federal government! They’re spending ALL their resources on getting federal jobs here. The few private sector companies they’re seeking are government contractors!
They’re doing NOTHING to nurture homegrown entrepreneurs – which is what built this city to begin with! Local innovators virtually created the modern world! Based on what today’s business leaders are funding and not funding, the world of the future will consist entirely of surveillance technology!
Some might argue that defense deserves all the resources because there might be a war. Guess what? We’re ALREADY in a war! It’s an economic war! And our opponents are wiping the global floor with us! Defense cannot exist without an economic base to support it! It seems that the local leadership would rather see every last job disappear from America than see one job created that’s not controlled by the federal government!
Large numbers of new product ideas are being ignored by the local business leaders. Thousands of new jobs would have been created by now! Every day of delay means another six families lose their homes to foreclosure. Dayton Ohio is the LAST place in the world that should be having the kind of problems it’s having. We have the world’s greatest wealth of product innovators! All we lack is business leaders who are willing to make any use of it!
Jeffrey K. Putman,
Professional Engineer
Kettering Ohio
Jeff, the thought that we need to encourage business via government is a little too anti-capitalist for me (and I’m one of those who thinks the free market is of limited effectiveness).
I do not trust our elected officials to know what innovations are worth promoting. I base that distrust on their records of supporting existing businesses through infrastructure and tax breaks. Municipalities have forfeited billions in tax revenues and public funds to promote GM, Mead, NCR, Reynolds and Reynolds–and what have we to show for it?
I favor a national constitutional amendment that forbids governments from giving tax breaks to individual citizens or corporations. Of course, governments could still provide grant programs–but the process of applying for and receiving grants would be more open and available than the current process of a corporation negotiating behind closed doors.
No tax breaks or grants encouraged Kettering, Fraze, Patterson, or the Wright brothers. Just put a better system of public education in place, provide a level playing field, and I’m confident that the inventions will emerge.
Jeff, your observation about the Dayton area not encouraging innovators, I believe, ties in with a theme I keep coming back to — “http://daytonos.com/?p=8130 ” rel=”nofollow”>If We Are To Have A Great Future, The Ascending Issue In Our Democracy Must Be Democracy Itself” It seems to me that the vitalized leadership that we need can only come from a vitalized democracy. The monolithic bureaucracy you refer to, I believe, arises from and is sustained by the malfunction of our democracy. We know that totalitarian states seldom initiate innovations and that innovation and entrepreneurship, on the other hand, are much more likely to flourish in free and democratic societies. When we look for the reason that the great potential found in Dayton has failed to develop, we need to look at Dayton as a system. We are experiencing system failure, because we have allowed anti-democratic forces to gain control.
The better system of public education and the level playing field that Dr. Ruddick refers to, again, must come from a vitalization of our democratic structure. We have forsaken public control of public education and have allowed special interests to control public education for its own purposes. We need leadership in education that puts the public interest first, and this leadership will not arise within the educational bureaucracy, but must come via democratic processes, via a democratic revolution of sorts that elects school boards that have an allegience to the public good.
Similarly, we cannot expect leadership anywhere to arise within the stale and anti-democratic political and governmental structure as it currently exists. Our hope as a city and as a nation must come though making a system of democracy work. There is not much hope so long as the current system of special interest and insider cronyism continues to dominate.
Consigning economic development to a single agency is a fatal mistake. It is indeed a very anti-democratic thing to do.
A free market is the ultimate form of democracy. No one agency has veto power over what may be produced. If one entity decides to not pursue a project, there are many more who might take it up. That is why a free market will ALWAYS perform vastly better than a planned economy!
Some people might think that Dayton Development Coalition is an expert at economic development. It is not! The proof is in the results. With all the advantages the Dayton area has, this area is the LAST place in the world that should be having the kind of problems it’s having!
I wrote “Top Ten Tips For Economic Development” (http://daytonos.com/?p=7801) to make available the needed knowledge that Dayton Development Coalition lacks. Whether or not they learn anything from it is entirely up to them. Nobody can be forced to learn anything. Some people just keep on suffering the consequences of their ignorance and still never learn.
Meanwhile, other people who ARE willing to learn can seize the opportunities and earn great profits! ANY investor/philanthropist can earn numerous fortunes from the opportunities that DDC is ignoring!
And that really NEEDS to happen! Many thousands of families are losing their homes waiting for that to happen!
Thanks to the Dayton Daily News for publishing this Letter to the Editor on Sunday, January 13, 2008 (yes, almost two years ago) I decided it should also be archived here.
Management has replaced leadership
Dayton is a leading city in all the wrong categories: job losses, foreclosures, etc. How is that possible? Dayton is the last place in the world that should be having this kind of trouble. This city is the place that transforms the world with new products.
I know of hundreds of new products waiting to be developed. Several major industries are waiting to be born.
So why is that not happening? “Management” has replaced leadership. If Lewis and Clark had been “managed” the way people and projects are today, the West would still not be explored. Lewis and Clark would have been denied funding because they could not document in advance everything they were going to discover.
Nobody is investing in product development because “managers” demand to be told in advance exactly how big the market is. You cannot collect sales data for products that do not exist. New products create new markets. You should make estimates, but, in the end, somebody needs to have the courage to invest in new products.
The Dayton Development Coalition has done a good job of helping companies at a certain stage of growth, but the vast majority of new products die before they can reach that stage of development.
Someone needs to step up and provide financial leadership, and have the integrity to safely turn proprietary information into intellectual property.
Jeffrey K. Putman
Kettering