Dear Editor:

An enumerated power of the federal government of the United States is to coin money and “To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers.”

In 1971, when the United States stopped converting the dollar into gold, the method for redistributing fiat money had already been established in the United States Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1968, with suggestions for state and municipal legislation found in The Joint Study.

In 1969, by constitutional amendment, Maine became a Home Rule State, but that didn’t prevail since the Maine Legislature, for all practical purposes, overruled Home Rule by Legislative deeming when, in 1976, it declared that centrally managing the economy is an essential government function which must be done by public-private relationships. Then the Maine Legislature chartered The Maine Capital Corporation.

The MCC was justified as needed to help an organically developing small business culture find capital, a reasoning by which small businesses were defined as start-up companies whose goal was to become a large company. Should there be any other motivation for being a small business, the government didn’t care to know. Governor Longly formed a council made up of the heads of the largest corporations in Maine. Small businesses were not invited to the powwow.

My Dad was one of those small businesses. He didn’t want investors who would tell him how to run the show. He wanted to make ceramics, his way. To preserve the independent lifestyle, he was willing to bootstrap financing, which was as much a part of the work process as was making ceramics.

Ultimately, the centrally managed economy wasn't about helping small businesses find capital; it came to be about subsidizing large businesses with taxpayer money, including that of small businesses, and calling it “job creation”.

But now many of those large corporations are shedding jobs, not creating them.

What’s left as job creators but small businesses?

We live in interesting times, once again. Can we peel back the centrally managed economy and find out where an organically grown roots-up process will take us?

Susan Mackenzie Andersen

Boothbay Harbor