The Uselessness of Centralized Economic Development and the Hope of UBI

13 min read

In my home town on the rural coast of Maine, we once had an economic development council, but it was little more than a public-private consortium with a license to spend the public’s money in the manner of a private development corporation. The council spent taxpayer money on consultants and on advertising campaigns for down town hospitality businesses. For a while, after spending an amount of public resources, the council laid low, before announcing that it was reconvening. Shortly afterward, the pandemic hit, taking economic hospitality development off the table, and the council announced that it was closing down for good,…...

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Susan Mackenzie Andersen Mackenzie Andersen works in the field of product design and handcrafted production. She was raised in a designer-craftsman business in a home. Weston and Brenda Andersen established Andersen Design on the coast of Maine in 1952. The company created a large inventory of slip cast functional forms, wildlife sculptures, original glazes and decorative techniques, made from raw materials sourced in the USA. Andersen Design’s founding mission was to create a handcrafted product affordable to the middle class. Mackenzie’s mission is to reinvent the company as a twenty first century designer craftsmen network, an updated cottage industry, using the Andersen Design brand as a marketing and a common designer-craftsmen community resource. In addition to design and production, Mackenzie is interested in history, philosophy, wealth redistribution, bitcoin, centralization vs complexity theory, and work as a quality of life issue. Part of the ceramic mindset is to understand the world at an interactive molecular level, a perspective that Mackenzie follows through in an independent study of the economic development policy enacted in Maine since 1976, the year Maine became a centralized economy. As with ceramics, Mackenzie analyses the economic development system enacted in Maine as many parts designed to work as a whole.