This is to warn those in our state legislature that see development as something to fear. Populism will die with a whimper in South Dakota as coffers run dry and children leave for opportunities out of state.
Pierre has been loudly called a swamp to applause at the Brookings anti-pipeline forum, but so speaks the demagogue. I find it shocking that they call the capitol city a swamp when many of the swamp creatures were in that room.
The average number of constituents in South Dakota for State Representatives and State Senators is 5 times less than the average US State. That our state is becoming a populist confederacy of sixty six counties with a weak central authority is the trajectory of our current GOP Leadership. We have seen wild bills presented to our legislature and through cult-like faith, we are to turn away anything that moos, smells, or might hire someone that’s not a local to please every neighbor. We see the chipping away of project development and regulatory uniformity so that South Dakota remains closed to business. Adam Smith’s concept of the Invisible Hand will not work if our state officials manipulate our business environment to fit their personal whims of whats worthy for South Dakota. We embrace change so we don’t create a generation that get their marching orders from fear mongers and do-nothings. We came to the frontier to build it, that was celebrated in would-be settler publications over a century ago. With every railroad tie pulled that promise is vanishing. They came, and we’re here, for opportunity.
JES Farms would have never been allowed in South Dakota today because of the canal system alone. Until I can be disproven, then how are my children inheriting freedom as we’ve lived it? Dreams are never small and inoffensive when it comes to American greatness.
Now our legislature will debate zero property taxes. Property taxes are for compensation to the citizenship for depriving them of the use of that land. Thomas Paine understood how a nation could create its own elite and suffer its tyranny. The founders structured our government to prevent a despotic concentration of power. When did some farmers start looking in a mirror and seeing a King instead of a fellow citizen? It is a bizarre shame that those with little to no land would ever support a zero property tax. It would cause an entrenched oligarchy of landowners, further boosted by the federal farm program. The burden of that missing tax revenue will fall on the shoulders of the people the property taxes were meant to provide for. Instead of zero property tax, we could toil over our pathetic infrastructure to get our goods to market cheaper, or lower interest rates. We should not be toying with the inability to properly fund school teachers and local police. Our property rights should be protected by those that won’t chain them to a mobs popular opinion about its development, as raw land or nothing. Property tax elimination is the destruction of the centuries old paternalism between landowner and village, curbing revolutions that might have otherwise taken place. The despotism is now overflowing with the radical effort to be anti-development by our GOP leadership, weaponising conservatism against our own Republican colleagues.
Republicans are not in control of the South Dakota legislature, the populist conservatives are. I’ve heard pitched xenophobia against both Saudi Arabia and Israel during the anti-pipeline forums. Both American allies slandered. That behavior comes the same way, by demagogues whipping up hysteria to a contrived enemy. It is the devolution of professional politicians and unworthy of our halls. The Eschenbaum Mob should be thrown out for the sake of party integrity. Their tar and feather politics floods local social media repeatedly. They have become gatekeepers to our natural resources, vilifying those neighbors that would resist the paralytic policies that seize our economy. Instead of statesman, we have too many agitators. Instead of willing participants in the free market, we have protests by those who believe they suffer not through its consequence.