Grading Places: What Do the Business Climate Rankings Really Tell Us Peter Fisher Economic Policy Institute - Oregon Center for Public Policy

Grading Places: What Do the Business Climate Rankings Really Tell Us: "With a ranking of 1st being “best” and 50th “worst,” Oregon ranks 39th on the Small Business Survival Index, 10th on the State Business Tax Climate Index, 15th on the Competitiveness Index, 42nd on CATO’s Fiscal Policy Report Card, and 29th on the Economic Freedom Index."

Rankings seem erather arbitrary and so are given to ideologic interpretations. Perhaps a deeper analysis would help produce better analysis; rather than "climate" as the analogous concept we could more properly use "ecology" and "environment."

Economic activity is as much biologic activity as is are any other activities of living systems. As such economic agents choose and respond to their environments just as biologic organisms do.

What government does is to present itself as part of the environment to which economic activity must adapt. The economic ecology doesn't require government to be part of it but if it is, government may increase harm and danger in the economic ecology. Government can create toxic or restrictive environments by outlawing certain activities such as hiring undocumented workers, engaging in drug trade, using certain drugs, violating zoning laws, conducting business without licensing, or violating prohibitions. Like parasites, government can feed off the economic agents by drawing off their economic energy by taxing them. Government raze a diverse ecology to create economic mono-cultures by requiring exclusive government services in some sectors such as public schools or postal services or health care. Government can restrict the economic enviroinment or the ecoomic agents by tariffs or restrictions on free trade. Government can favor some species of economic agents by giving them special protection through licensing, rent seeking endowments, or outright economic aliament with tax breaks or subsidies.

From the biological point of view, government usually is harmful and can at best be limited to protecting an economic ecoogy from destructive agents such as court and police agencies to protect economic agents from force and fraud. Government cannot contribute positively to the development of the economic ecology since the source of development of the economic ecology comes from the living economic agents who are at work interacting and creating to the extent they are free to conduct their constructive activities.

When government over-controls the economic environment, no ecological succession of economies can develop. Only very simple, primitive forms of economic activity can survive as in the examples of the economic ecologies of sub-African nations. The natural activity of living systems is to construct, adapt, extend their environments, organize relationships with their environments and the other living systems that are part of their environments.

If government is not restricted, it can only interfere with living economic systems by distorting them, destroying their accumulated resources, or making their economic environments more toxic. Government cannot create or develop the economic organisms who are the living agents of construction of the economic ecology. It can only slow down or even stopo economic adaptation and evolution.

The great advance of the human good comes as the economic agents, the citizens of a nation, gradually realize government is not a source of the common good but a detractor. And it is a realization that can only unfold incrementally, step-by-step within the large time frame of history as itself a form of biological evolution operating on the plane of the development of human thought.