Government meddling has suppressed good-old American entrepreneurship. You have to hand it to the people of Hardin, Montana. They seemed to have learned the lessons of the past twenty years: no more dot-com/real-estate/stock-market bubbles for them. They planned long-term economic development and they wanted to help the president close Gitmo.
They wanted to take some of these detainees off the military's hands:
....a 460-bed detention facility sits empty in Hardin. Built by Two Rivers Authority, the city's economic development arm, the facility was meant to bring economic development to Hardin by creating more than 100 high-paying jobs.
While leaders continue to look for contracts to open the jail, which was completed in 2007, people in Hardin have approached Two Rivers executive director Greg Smith saying they have the answer: Get the contract to hold those prisoners from Guantanamo.
Source: BillingsGazette.com
But this brilliant to jump-start Billings' economy has been quashed--by no less than their very own Congressional delegation:
Rep. Denny Rehberg, a Republican, said the detainees are terrorists and "we should be doing everything possible to keep them out of our country, let alone our state."
I really can't wrap my head around this attitude: consensus in Lincoln, Montana seems to be that Ted Kaczynski was an exemplary neighbor.
Maybe Rehberg is feeling burned by Montana's abysmal failure to create a Unabomber tourism industry, and blowing a potential cash cow like having al-Qaeda members in your midst would just be another embarrassing business failure to soon.
I can't help but think Montana's Congressmen are totally wrong on this issue: considering the still-fuzzy legal status of Gitmo detainees, having them in that correctional facility could mean that a lot of the good people of Hardin would have jobs for life.
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