Business Incentives
If we lower the costs of doing business in our county across-the-board “they will come.” Economic Development should not be based on cutting case-by-case deals with individual companies, which seek to avoid excessive costs of doing business in our county. At their best these incentives become a corporate welfare program. And, unless we have saints running the process, at their worst “incentives” can become merely a polite facade for what used to be called, bribes, kickbacks and extortion. We should not open the public treasury for elected officials to negotiate business deals with.
In place of company specific incentives Guilford County should learn from other jurisdictions, which have uniformly lifted restrictions and the various costs of doing business in our county and simply let the free-market take its course. Any potential drawbacks from this approach are far less onerous than the potential for corruption inherent in incentive programs.
