Who wouldn’t like to give other people money? Mountain BizWorks has a plan to do just that. They are requesting $50,000 from the Buncombe County Commissioners, which they will in turn loan to small businesses.
The need is immediate because it will fulfill the matching requirement for another grant. In other words, people don’t want to do their homework, so they assume any organization that can get a grant from somebody else, and vice versa, is worthy. The circularity ensures that those who are good at getting money will get more.
Furthermore, this is an example of how one form of favoritism breeds compensatory demands. Buncombe County is in the “everybody else is doing it” game of bestowing big gifts on big corporations, who could fail and sell off divisions to mom and pop if they really were in the dire “but-for” straits they claim. But no! It makes so much more sense to jack up taxes to pay government middlemen to build the fire and fight it with fire as Great Unequalizer and Great Equalizer.
