The rise and fall of St. Louis and other cities and towns stuck in the middle.
It comes down to lack of anti-trust laws and enforcement.
From the link:
St. Louisans, like Americans generally, take pride in their self-reliance. When things turn sour, they don’t blame others, but instead channel their energy to make their city better. While the convention business has declined, hosting only 350,000 visitors last year, local leaders are looking to renovate and upgrade the city’s key event space. A consortium of the city’s hospitals and universities has created a 200-acre innovation district in midtown St. Louis to nurture bioscience and pharmaceutical start-up companies. The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, funded by Monsanto’s philanthropic arm and the family that founded Ralston Purina, is doing the same in the agricultural-tech sector. Square announced last year that it would open a new office in St. Louis and hire 200 peopl.
A few St. Louis businessmen and politicians even tried assembling a package of taxpayer-funded incentives to convince Stan Kroenke not to move the Rams to L.A. But Kroenke didn’t take the bait. Interestingly, most St. Louisans reacted with contempt to the plan to try to bribe Kroenke with more public money. St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay announced that he and his city were done negotiating with the NFL, proclaiming, “[C]ities and hometown fans are commodities to be abandoned once they no longer suit the league’s purposes.” Having been through several of these cycles, St. Louisans now understand, more than they used to, that the game is rigged—that they could have a football team in a heartbeat if the NFL expanded the number of franchises to match the number of cities that can clearly support one. That’s how fair markets are supposed to work.
Applying that lesson more broadly, when the citizens of St. Louis—and of other small- and medium-sized cities across the country—look at the decline of their local economies, they may consider a different explanation than the one Kroenke offered. The economic fates of their communities may not be the result of their own failings, or of an inability to lure educated “creative class” types, or of offshoring or deindustrialization, or of the workings of a mysterious and immutable free market. Rather, their fates may be the result of decisions in Washington, influenced by a small group of legal scholars and economists, to overturn antitrust laws passed by elected officials of both parties over the course of the 20th century. These decisions quietly changed the rules of America’s economy to be more like the NFL’s, in which monopoly power isn’t fought but catered to, in which economic opportunity isn’t disbursed but consolidated, in which fewer cities—and fewer Americans—get a fair chance to compete.
