From Builders to Rent-Seekers

There was a time when entrepreneurs crossed the Straits to Mackinac carrying the old burdens of commerce: Payrolls, machinery, expansion, risk.  They gathered beneath the Grand Hotel’s white facade to argue about factories, talent, roads, capital, and the stubborn work of building things in a northern state where winter itself can feel like an economic adversary.

Today, the ritual remains, but the center of gravity shifted.  The modern gathering often feels less like a congress of entrepreneurs than a convocation of rent-seekers, those who understand that public policy can be shaped into subsidy, advantage, and protected market share.  

For this class, Michigan may be flourishing.  The state budget has swollen by roughly 50% over eight years, with an additional $26 billion flowing through Lansing’s hands.  

Yet, our children now rank 44th nationally in reading, behind Mississippi, a sentence that would have sounded impossible to an earlier generation of Michiganians. 

Our roads linger near 40th in quality despite years of promises and billions in new spending.  Violent crime, measured per capita, has worsened relative to other states.  Our energy costs have climbed from the middle of the pack to among the nation’s highest, making it costlier to power a factory floor, a welding torch, a server farm, or simply an air conditioner in July than in most of America.

Meanwhile, other states are lowering taxes while ours drift upward.  Other states are improving schools while ours slide backward.  Other states are building wealth faster, while Michigan has fallen to roughly the bottom quartile nationally in GDP per capita.  We remain a large economy, but increasingly not a particularly productive one.

And this is the uncomfortable truth beneath the cheerful panel discussions and catered receptions: Relative decline rarely announces all at once.  It arrives quietly.  One ranking slips.  Then another.  Then another.  Eventually, the pattern becomes too consistent to dismiss.

Michigan possesses immense advantages still.  Fresh water.  Industrial heritage.  Extraordinary natural beauty.  But geography alone cannot sustain prosperity.  A peninsula can become either a workshop or a retreat.  Without serious reform, we risk becoming less a center of production than a scenic preserve: A place where affluent people visit in August while opportunity departs year-round.

Facts are stubborn things.  And to continue ignoring the consequences of failed policy is, in the old phrase, to whistle past the graveyard.