Sunday, April 28, 2019

Honky Tonk Welfare in Nashville

Thomas DiLorenzo writes:

I read that the city government of Nashville gave the NFL $3 million as part of the deal to hold the NFL draft there.  It’s probably a lot more when one counts all the police overtime, thousands of portable toilets, public works cleanup after 300,000 drunken football fans, etc.

Among the major beneficiaries of these handouts, besides the NFL billionaire team owners, appear to be the wealthy country music stars who own bars and restaurants on Music Row where more than 100,000 extra customers per day gathered for the better part of a week. 


Blake Shelton, Dierkes Bentley, Luke Bryan, and others all own big restaurants and bars there.  Much of that $3 million ended up in their bank accounts as a result of a quadrupling or more of their weekend business.  The taxpaying residents, on the other hand, were screwed with impossible traffic and crowds everywhere, noise, trash galore, jacked-up prices at bars and restaurants, etc. 

This seems to be the modus operandi of towns that are “tourist destinations”:  The purpose of local government there is not to “serve the public” but to make more money for the bar and restaurant owners there who in turn finance the political careers of the political hacks on the city council and the mayor’s office.

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