No Free Lunches?

Nor free bridges either, evidently.  "It's been very well documented that grandkids in Michigan are not going to have to pay that [bridge] off because the Canadian government is going to pay for it.  Michigan taxpayers of any age, including your grandkids, are not on the hook", assured John Bebow, Center for Michigan's Truth Squad, a watchdog monitoring political advertising in the state.

Mr. Bebow was responding to the well-funded campaign to turn voters in Michigan away from voting in favour of the new proposed bridge, through Proposal 6, on November 6 when they go out to the polls to vote for their next President of the United States.  Should Proposal 6 be successful, with enough Michiganders voting in its favour, the state constitution would be amended.

And that would be of huge personal benefit, very lucrative benefit, to a stakeholder in the enterprise.  Not the people of Michigan for whom a new bridge between Canada and the United States - more specifically between Windsor, Ontario and Detroit, Michigan, where trade traffic is constricted with the inadequate current bridge - would be immensely useful in enhancing trade and employment.

It would be Matty Moroun and his family, owners of the Ambassador toll bridge that renders to them $80-million yearly for whom the benefit would accrue.  The very thought of a publicly-paid-for bridge put in place to ease traffic congestion in the matter of the $120-billion in trade that flows across between Canada and the U.S. competing with the Moroun family's private bridge represents anathema.

Fully one-quarter of the annual trade between the two countries under NAFTA flows through that bridge.  The Moroun family has engaged in a stupendous public relations effort to apprise Michiganders that there are no free lunches; they will be on the hook to pay for an expensive new trade conduit between the two countries.  They have spent roughly $10-million so far in the effort.

And through that effort comprised of television spots, campaign handouts, door-to-door canvassers, robocalls and whatever other means to spread the message seems useful, an amazing number of normally intelligent people are convinced that the bridge which the Government of Canada has assured the State of Michigan it will fully fund - in acknowledgement of Michigan's fiscal plight - will actually be paid by them sometime down the road.

Most state unions, the automakers, the Michigan Governor's office, the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, and economists, along with the Ohio and Indiana state legislatures as well, back the bridge.  The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia revealed research findings that concluded Michigan's economy is the worst of any mainland state in the U.S.  Detroit's infrastructure has become blighted.

Should the bridge-building project proceed as state legislators wish it to, it would produce jobs for Michiganders, and in the process allow for facilitating improved trade movement, in turn supporting even more jobs.  But Matty Moroun has done a really fine job of persuading the people of Michigan that the bridge would cost them, not gift them with opportunities.

His costly, extensive, ubiquitous campaign to persuade voters to "yes" his Proposal 6 is meant to scupper the bridge plans.  And in the process leave him as the private owner of the only game in town whereby trade between the two countries will continue to hobble along at the pace that suits him.  Ohio and India would stand to benefit as well as Michigan with the building of a new bridge to expedite trade traffic.

"Michigan cannot turn over control of its Constitution to a special interest, one guy who wants to maintain a stranglehold on this corridor's commercial traffic...  It's an economic, it's a security risk, it's a hazard to the State of Michigan", insisted Michigan's Lt.-Gov. Brian Calley, speaking of the passage of the Proposition being akin to the state 'shooting itself in the foot'.

Matty Moroun is simply following the capitalist entrepreneur's credo of the bottom line; his family's fortune is being threatened, and he is entitled by the freedoms guaranteed under the Constitution to prove that free speech is his entitlement, even if he's proving that other old credo that you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time; Lincoln believed it, anyway.