Like millions of my fellow Coloradans, I did not venture outdoors last Tuesday to attend the inauguration of state officers, among them Gov. John Hickenlooper. But I did read his speech.
During my years of watching Hickenlooper from afar, he’s always struck me as a pragmatist, not an ideologue. He seems more interested in finding something that works, rather than fretting about whether it advances the alleged liberal goal of Expanding Evil Government or the apparent conservative aim of Growing Corporate Power.
What struck me as odd was the warm response to his first three executive orders, all with the stated aim of producing more jobs in Colorado.
An executive order is something a governor can do all on his own. He doesn’t need to hustle it through the General Assembly, argue for it in the courts, or take it to a public referendum.
Now, if creating more jobs in Colorado were merely a matter of writing executive orders, don’t you think Bill Ritter or Bill Owens would have tried it? Were they so heartless as to think, “You know, I could put thousands of Coloradans to work by issuing a few executive orders, but I won’t”?
Granted, Owens was a Republican and there are members of that party who like high unemployment because it keeps wages down and discourages the remaining employees from getting uppity. But I’ve known Owens for years, and he never struck me as that variety of Republican.
The second problem with connecting executive orders to employment is that few decisions about Colorado’s economy are made in Colorado. This goes clear back to the fur-trapping days of the 1830s, when the appearance of a London fop in a silk hat, rather than one of beaver felt, changed the prevailing style and put Rocky Mountain trappers out of work.
Statehood in 1876 was supposed to give Colorado more control over its own destiny, but it didn’t work out that way. The state’s economy crashed in 1893 with the repeal of the federal Sherman Silver Purchase Act. My grandparents said in Colorado, the Depression actually started during the 1920s, thanks to the collapse of metal and agricultural prices after World War I. It’s hard to imagine how a Colorado governor could have changed any of that.
No governor caused the uranium boom of the early 1950s, or decided to put thousands of Coloradans out of work by pulling the plug on Exxon’s Colony Shale Oil Project in 1982. No governor decreased the world demand for molybdenum, causing thousands of miners to lose their jobs. Colorado governors don’t control beef or wheat prices, nor do they set the interest rates that so affect home and commercial construction.
But for a moment, let’s imagine that somehow our governor could cause our unemployment to plunge from 8.1 percent to 1.5 percent or less, just by dashing off a few executive orders.
Would Coloradans enjoy stable, well-paid jobs with good benefits? Or would we be inundated with job-seekers from high-unemployment states like Arizona, Coahuila and Nevada? Wouldn’t the newcomers likely be more skilled, ambitious, educated and credentialed than the local stock? I can’t remember that any past boom in Colorado employment made me any better off, except if I wanted to sell my house for a lot more than I paid for it.
So all this talk about governors and jobs is just that: talk. Colorado governors have little control over the state’s economy, and even if they did, we might not be any better off. We’d just be more crowded.
Ed Quillen (ekquillen@gmail.com) of Salida is a regular contributor to The Denver Post.
