Government does a terrible job picking winners and losers. Missouri proved it with pot | Opinion

After a vote last year, Missouri has embraced the good side of marijuana, but only now are we noticing that weed comes with greed and games.

You’d think that since people have been willing to kill and go to prison over the green stuff that it would have been expected. But no, Missourians imagined that the weed biz would attract just the right sort of people.

With a constitutional amendment, we’d be able to undo some past wrongs while honest, upstanding former criminals from underserved neighborhoods would be delivering our newly legalized recreational drugs. What a laugh.

The reality, as The Kansas City Star’s Kacen Bayless reports, is that bumbling state government is in the process of delivering the Missouri weed business into the hands of greedy big businesses and game-playing out-of-state predatory investors.

If anyone had bothered to look, the federal government has a decadeslong record of attempting to make sure that business goes to just the right sort of people whether it is disadvantaged businesses, women-owned businesses, small businesses or minority-owned businesses and then blowing it.

Every year, millions of dollars in no-bid contracts set aside for the right sort of people go to women-owned businesses helmed by men and the giant contractors who dress themselves up as minority micro-enterprises.

Good intentions implemented by the fat fingers of big government can’t compete with the games greedy people play.

Take the brother-in-law of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, William Wages. One day while feeling blue about his business’s lack of million-dollar government contracts, he was counting his blessings compared to his imaginary Native American ancestors who once peopled this great land of ours before they were unceremoniously displaced.

Wages then came up with the idea to get a bunch of other white guys with imaginary Native American ancestors to issue him an ID card that certified he was one-eighth Cherokee. Somehow, the feds (and the state of California) bought this and showered his company with millions in no-bid construction contracts.

Eventually, the government noticed that this was a little silly and ended Wages’ pretendian grift. Then Wages came up with a new idea.

If those jerky federal identity cops wouldn’t fork over the cash anymore, he’d find a new way to be a minority, so he became a “mentor” to the owner of another down-on-its-luck construction firm owned by a genuine Latino. They formed a joint venture where Latino-owned J.J. Leon Construction would get the contracts and Wages’ pretendian-owned Vortex Construction would profitably do much of the work.

Millions more flowed from state and federal coffers.

Fake business used Starbucks address for fraud

The decadeslong gaming of state and federal contracting rules would be outrageous if it wasn’t so common. One year, the Office of Inspector General of the Small Business Administration looked at 56 contracts to see if those receiving them were the right sort of people. In 51 cases, they couldn’t tell. That’s typical of a pile of inspector general and Government Accountability Office reports I have read.

Eventually, even Congress noticed that bureaucrats weren’t so good at making sure the right sort of people got the government boodle to make up for sins of the past when it was common to discriminate against women and minorities in business, so leaving all those old incompetently-run government programs in place, they came up with a new idea.

They’d give no-bid set-aside contracts to businesses in the places where minorities lived. Kansas City on both sides of the river is covered in things called HUBZones or Historically Underutilized Business Zones, where businesses are supposed to get special deals. The GAO took a look at 17 businesses in the Washington, D.C., HUBZone and found 10 out of 17 either weren’t located in the right place or didn’t hire enough employees from the HUBZone. In one case a business listed its address as a small room above a dentist’s office when it was really based in a posh Virginia suburb.

Investigators asked themselves whether federal workers were that easy to hoodwink, so they created a fake business and used the address of a Starbucks. All it would take to turn down their fake company for benefits was a Google search of the address. The federal bureaucrats who run the program couldn’t be bothered, so the fake was approved along with three other applications with equally damning flaws.

So yeah, Missouri law says the right sort of people should be given a leg up in the weed business. Let me know when the government figures out how to do that.