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Neither I nor any close friends need to spend much time consulting with our brokers about our stock portfolios, but even so, some Wall Street promotional material seeps down this way. Most of it resembles those services which purport to produce winning Lotto sequences or I Ching combinations, but one stock-selecting scheme appeared to be based on sound principles.
According to the propaganda, most Main Street investors put their money in precisely the wrong stocks. That is, if Mr. and Mrs. America, Joe Sixpack and Jane Q. Public are buying computer and utility stocks, the savvy investor will get out of those and into steel or railroads because computer and utility stocks are sure to plummet.
This service keeps track of the stock-buying patterns of the unwashed masses, thereby providing sound contrarian guidance to the prudent investor who knows that the little guy is always wrong.
At first I thought a similar service might be useful in the public sector, too, so that towns and cities might know whether it was better to put money into schools, sewers or streets. But then I realized that Denver appears to be performing that service already.
For instance, no city spent more time receiving
expansion promises from Major League Baseball, and no city
was betrayed as often as Denver. No city tried harder to
show that it could support a team, despite the sparse
population of the Mountain Time Zone: a host of
minor-league attendance records, all those packed Let's
show them
exhibition games.
Denver eventually gets a major-league team, and breaks all known attendance records. The city invests in a sparkling new stadium, and beyond the financial, there's a considerable emotional investment in fanship and an intellectual investment in memorizing arcane statistics.
And what happens after Denver makes all these
investments in major-league baseball? They quit playing it.
A smart metropolis might have reasoned that They're
investing in baseball in Denver, which means something will
go wrong with baseball, and so we should try rugby or
horseshoes.
Another example might be DIA. Go back a decade, when air travel was growing at an exponential rate and Denver had three hubs. A new airport sounded like a good investment in 1985, just as high-flying International Widget might sound like a good investment to a Main Street household.
And then, of course, air travel quit growing, while two-thirds of Denver's hub carriers essentially vanished.
Again, the savvy city, considering a new aiport might
have reasoned that It sounds good, and it certainly
appears that we could use a new airport, but Denver is
building one, and that means the air-transport industry is
due for a tumble.
Denver gets a new airport, and people cut back on their flying. Denver gets a baseball team, and the player go on strike. What next?
One omen is serious. Later this month, Denver will open a handsome new library (well, not quite new; they're keeping that hideous facade from the old building). Given the city's track record in selecting public investments, this probably means that people will quit reading, that authors will go on strike, or that the EPA will discover that minute paper fragments cause cancer in one out of every 6 million rats exposed to high concentrations of book dust, and order the closing of all public libraries as toxic health hazards.
Perhaps Denver could forestall this fate by quickly turning its attention to other public investments which, if they went sour, could serve the public good.
For instance, there's a lot of agitation to expand the Front Range portion of Interstate 70 -- on a busy winter weekend, the corridor is 100 miles of gridlock from Vail to Aurora. So get with it, Denver, and as soon as the tunnel gets an expensive third bore and the highway boasts a dozen lane -- people will find other things to do in the winter, and our mountains will return to backwater serenity, as God intended.
Inside the city, rather than invest in light-rail as a means to get cars off the highway, Denver should instead build more freeways. The way things work, metro residents will start jamming themselves into buses and trolley cars just after the ribbon is cut.
The city could also take the lead in fighting crime by constructing a couple of penitentaries on the Lowry and Stapleton sites. Naturally, as soon as Denver put a few hundred million into accomodating felons, people would start behaving themselves and the facilities would stand forlorn and empty.
Denver could fight poverty by building handsome new shelters for the recently evicted bridge dwellers, and could probably eliminate war by attracting a few more defense contractors with subsidies and tax abatements.
So while some folks in the hinterlands complain that Denver is sucking up all the public-works money in the state, the city is actually performing a valuable service: other cities now know what not to do, and if Denver were more aware of its role, it could solve many social problems with more dumb investments.
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