The Wheeler-Rayburn Act of 1935 prohibited electricity, gas, and water utilities from speculating in unregulated businesses with ratepayers’ money and ensured that companies like Union Electric would remain locally headquartered and focused. The Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 protected small retailers by prohibiting manufacturers from giving larger discounts to chain stores, and the Miller-Tydings Act of 1937 did the same by permitting manufacturers to set a minimum price at which their goods could be sold. These laws safeguarded local-area retailers like Central Hardware and Bettendorf-Rapp supermarkets, as well as neighborhood pharmacies, bakeries, restaurants, clothing stores, and grocers—including those servicing the city’s predominant minority and African-American communities
These sorts of restrictions on competition were repealed in the 1980s, and subsequently many local St.Louis businesses were bought out or were driven out of business.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. My remarks:
1. I thought that Phil Longman was planning to write this article.
2. As a St. Louisan, I remembered all the advertising slogans in the article. It never occurred to me that “I’m a meat man, and a meat man knows, the finest meats m’am are, Mayrose.” The one slogan that they author forgot to include is “Earn 4-1/14 on each dollar you own, at Community Federal Savings and Loan.”
3. The fact that some St. Louis businesses are no longer headquartered in St. Louis or no longer are in business is not some grand tragedy. It is part of what happens in a dynamic economy.
4. Why did the St. Louis advertising and PR industries lose their prominence? I doubt that public policy was the main factor.
And to the extent that public policy was a factor, the article suggests that it was the removal of protectionist intra-national trade barriers that precipitated the decline, rather than active measures to screw over mid-sized cities.
At lot of nonsense. During the time that St Louis was declining, smaller cities like Phoenix and Denver were thriving and growing. And it’s not just western cities — nearby Indianapolis, Columbus, and Nashville have all boomed since 1980 and each now has more than twice the population of the city of St Louis (in fact, St Louis has managed to lose an even greater percentage of its peak population than has Detroit!) St Louis’s failure and decline is its own, not the inevitable result of externally-imposed changes that have affected all similarly situated cities.
There is kind of an issue here, not so much economic but political, about what sort of role medium sized metropolises should play in our society, how important regions should be vis-à-vis the nation, etc. Do we really want to take ALL the scientific talent in our society, all the corporate decision making, all the culture generating activity, all the highest intellectual and academic positions, and transfer them over time to half a dozen major cities — LA, SF, NYC, DC, maybe Boston and Chicago — leaving the “flyover space” between as a wasteland inhabited by ill-educated peasants?
Or would we prefer a nation with much more dispersed economic and cultural activity? Where St Louis has major league sports and industries and advertising agencies, where Cleveland has world-quality universities and orchestras, where Seattle and its outskirts are home for the planet’s leading software firms?
Shouldn’t this be a permissible topic of debate? Shouldn’t this be intentionally — rather than accidentally — shaped by politics and legislation? And is it actually liberal or conservative to chose one alternative or another?
To mike shupp,
You pose your concerns as questions, but there is no one to answer you. I suggest reforming your concerns as proposals. Format: “This is wrong, that is wrong, this would be better”
Then you could argue for your positions and suggest your solutions.
I hope the solutions would not be: Let’s form a division of the government to review all of the voluntary choices which are bringing about these (supposedly) bad effects, and either prevent them by law (force) or pay the people to do something else.
I will reverse your last question. Shouldn’t all this be left to the voluntary choices of the people involved, which are not accidents, instead of being directed by politics and legislation?
More simply, who is supposed to force the next engineer to move to Omaha rather than to Chicago, and how could he possibly know what would be better, and for whom? It didn’t work out well for the USSR or current Russia when they tried this.
Andrew:
I don’t have any definite proposals in mind, just a general notion that “things” ought to be spread about a bit more. It’s sad to drive across country and see how many small towns and medium sized cities have shrunk over the past few decades, Once these were good places to live and raise families, and now they’re places from which young people flee for the big cities.
One suggestion: do some outsourcing for the federal government. Decentralize. Put a big chunk of the FAA in Atlanta, for example. Move Veteran Administration paper processing to Cleveland. Put some DoD purchasing offices in Dayton and Riverside. Put the Patent Office in Walla Walla. Move the “summer White House” to Anchorage.
This is a big country — 3000 miles across, with 300 million people — big as all Europe combined. It’s preposterous to let half a dozen costal metropolises monopolize our urban environment.
The fact that St Louis has been in decline, doesn’t mean that all medium sized metro areas are similarly afflicted — there are a whole lot that have been growing while St Louis has been shrinking.
Last Republican mayor in 1949.
The Supreme Court could be moved to a more central, more representative location in the country.