We came across a press release dated Friday from Elevate Ventures, the private nonprofit company the state of Indiana, through its Indiana Economic Development Corp. (IEDC), contracted to spend your dollars investing in private companies. Presumably it all exists to help young companies hire people and create wealth that will improve all our lives.
We sympathize with the goal, and at one time we might have agreed to the concept. But unintended consequences never rest, especially when the government becomes involved. And, to quote the prophet Jeremiah about a matter on which most secular journalists and police officers would agree, “The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked.”
Such is what often fills our news pages.
Elevate Ventures invested taxpayer money in companies run by its chairman, Howard Bates, and his son, Justin Bates. The IEDC and the U.S. Department of Treasury are investigating.
The Friday statement to “community stakeholders,” which should include every living soul in Indiana, states the following:
“The Indiana Economic Development Corporation (“IEDC”) has been a highly-valued partner to our efforts. We look forward to the review and any subsequent recommendations.
“Elevate Ventures started conducting business in March 2011, as our former Governor Mitch Daniels took a progressive step towards catalyzing private sector participation in assisting and investing in high-potential Indiana companies. This was a natural evolution of the 21 Fund, which moved from a grant-giving entity to a provider of targeted resources to innovation-based startups.”
Searching for meaning in those sentences, it appears moving “from a grant-giving entity to a provider of targeted resources” means Elevate Ventures picks winners and losers with your money. We don’t know the criteria to determine who can get Indiana dollars and become a winner, but being a family member of the chairman is certainly not an obstacle.
The statement went on to say the operators of the public/private partnership learned “public dollars alone cannot fill the funding gaps in the Indiana entrepreneurial ecosystem.”
That’s startling because it means there must have been people who thought handing out public dollars to entrepreneurs would solve some of the state’s economic problems, perhaps much like those who still think handing dollars to schools fixes education, or that, as we are finding out through Obamacare, more taxpayer money can cure what ails us — literally.
We are guaranteed nothing from public money but spending, which can be either good or bad, and dependency — which is never good but sometimes unavoidable.
But it was the words “Indiana entrepreneurial ecosystem” that really caught our eye. We did not realize the disparate group of people trying to start businesses and make the American dream come true for themselves and others had in fact formed a ecosystem under the shelter of the state government. We are familiar with the ecosystem that exists in most backyards. In it the strong usually hunt the defenseless and feed them to their offspring.
So when Howard Bates sent taxpayer money to his son’s business, it’s the adult bird feeding worms to its young.
On behalf of taxpayers, we would like to ask to be moved up the food chain, have the occasional egg for breakfast and determine the menu ourselves rather than a private group a lavishing public money on its own interests.