The Winston-Salem Journal notes in this big lead editorial that ‘Winston-Salem’seconomic development minds’ make up the task force that will hopefully land a new tenant for the soon-to-be abandoned Dell plant. A commenter notes with irony that they are the same economic development minds who brought Dell here in the first place.

I’m a little puzzled by this paragraph (my italics):

No tenant will generate the excitement and high hopes that Dell did. But in the hard light of late 2009, it’s clear that much of the original Dell hoopla was fleeting, and its eventual departure not unexpected. In the high-tech economy, consumer demands change with sometimes lightning speed and companies adapt or go away, which is a standing argument for ironclad incentive payback agreements every time.

Help me out here, but it looks to me like the Journal is telling us that governments should hand out economic incentives with the expectation that business will eventually fall victim to economic reality. Funny, that’s not the message we were hearing as government was bending over backwards to land Dell. Support businesses would spring up around the plant and the Triad’s economy would boom for generations to come.

This is the type of logic you regularly see in newspaper editorials.