Month: April 2022

Paris Texas is a quiet, sorta’ sleepy, strangely unsettled town, nestled in Lamar County, an area that once was a part of Miller County, Arkansas. Today, parts of the city’s heart have stopped beating. Historically, the downtown area was the heart of the city, pumping economic blood from city limits to city limits. But it’s likely that the central economic muscle will never return. 

There has been by-pass surgery of sorts, but to survive, Paris needs a new heart or a vast new miracle to get it working again.

In NE Texas, Paris is a clean air area. When folks in the Dallas and Fort Worth metroplex want a breathe of the unpolluted stuff they can visit Paris. They can purify their lungs with some deep breaths and admire the local Eiffel Tower, the Red River Valley Veterans Memorial, visit the Lamar County Historical Museum or John Chisum’s grave site or drive around and look at all the litter.

 

Other people, unless they have relatives here, who wander in or deliberately visit Paris, never fully quite understand why they do so –– Especially, after July 4th and on into the middle of September. Rain clouds drift along the Red River, and then off into the Land of the Razorbacks. Every year, the heat encourage locals to do strange things as they enjoy 100-degree temperatures that feel more like 110.

Saying people in Paris sweat is truly superfluous. And some don’t wait for summer to do it.

Strangely, a lot of people who live and work in North Dallas, Richardson, Plano, and other bedroom cities thrown together in northern areas of the metroplex, have never seen parts of an old town. So, when they wander into and around Paris, an old town, where most areas show it, Paris terrifies them.

 

Paris is blessed with numerous assets and, because of them, numerous opportunities. Maybe so many that our leadership can’t make a decision on what to do or how to do it, which keeps Paris from saving itself. It keeps looking for someone or something to do it.

The Paris Texas Chamber could … but the leadership refuses to ask HOW.

It’s a shame.

Because those assets remain unused; the opportunities are wasted.

Think not?

Then, please explain how – in 50-years or less – Paris went from the largest city in a 100-mile circle of NE Texas and SE Oklahoma, one of economic prominence and prosperity, the North Star of Texas, to the ugly, junky, weedy, litter-covered, population-losing, boarded up, tax-wasting, self-deluded mess we’re in today?

 

Name one Paris decision over the last 25-30-or so years that has made a significant difference in population, appearance, better-paying jobs, family incomes, community attitudes, etc. – anything beyond a stopgap measure or some project that had a limited impact?

You can, dear reader, get angry – cuss and be disgusted – but IF you’ll drive around Paris, inside the Loop you’ll see a community reeking with 3rd world results.

So, how can you honestly believe that Paris got to the shape it’s in by making intelligent decisions for community and economic improvement over the last 25-30-or so years?

Neither can we.

 

 

Nearly all schemes for uplifting society fail because the originators make the error of thinking that society is a manufactured thing, which can be altered by changing the process of how things are done. Most people see social order, economic growth, education and prosperity as being unobtainable unless engineered into existence – usually, by the government or the organization sponsoring a scheme for progress. This is one of the Big Myths.

These believers demand that each of us be deeply and forever in debt to the state or the sponsoring organization carrying out the process. They dogmatically believe that each of us owes these secular creators everlasting thanks and offerings – and they scold everyone who refuses to accept such an open-ended claim.

This is the Big Myth: To complain about paying taxes – and, worse, to actively oppose or reject the manufactured process – is selfishly resisting to give what is owed by each of us puny beneficiaries for the state’s or secular creator’s beneficence, magnificence, and grace.

Another Big Myth is that government carries out the will of the people as long as its top officials are chosen by majority rule. This niave faith in majoritarian democracy is a mistake because there is, in fact, no “will of the people.”

If, as individuals, we each have a sentient mind with our own hopes, fears, dreams and preferences, how do we become “the people” – as politicians like to refer to us?

“The people” is not a sentient creature with a mind and hopes, fears, dreams and preferences. Naturally, individuals can come together to make a group, but this does not transform the group of people into a giant individual equivalent to each of the flesh-and-blood men, women, and children who make up or comprise the group. It doesn’t mean that two or more individuals cannot agree upon an objective and goals to pursue together.

For centuries, individuals have pooled their resources to create communities, build roads and highways, and organized ways to defend ourselves (or even to attack others). But all this is a form of democratic decision-making, a “best means” way for registering the preferences of each individual in a way that results in an acceptable collective decision.

But this reality does not mean that the results of the democratic decision-making process reveal that “the people” have a will that is in any way similar to the will that is possessed and exercised by each individual. All that even the best collective decision-making process does is to discover a compromise outcome that is acceptable to each member of the group.

Supposing that the results of majority rule express the will of this collective creature – creates the false and dangerous impression that if any individual objects to a majority-rule outcome, this individual is attempting to elevate his paltry self over a will not only as real as his own but also greater because it is that of many individuals. But, again, “the People” is not a being with a mind or a will. It follows that no method of collective decision-making, not even the most ideal form of democracy, reveals the People’s will.

That which is unreal cannot be revealed.

And the most pernicious of all Big Myths is that the economy and society – or, at least, any economy that is productive, and any society that is good – are the conscious creation of the state or the collective control that leads to enslavement and human misery.

Society is not a manufactured process that can be controlled and managed.

It is a living entity, comprised of sentient individuals each with his or her own mind and preferences and fears and hopes. And for too long, the reality is that Paris has treated citizens as its resource.

The Paris leadership should remember that community growth will come from Paris being a resource for its citizens.

 

return to the Paris Texas Chamber of Commerce

Jointly, currently, the City of Paris, the Paris Economic Development Corporation (PEDC), and the Lamar County Chamber of Commerce are paying a Florida firm (Florida?) to develop a Branding/Identity – a common new tagline – which they can use to try and sell a perception of the three being one united group.

As all three have lived off the taxpayers, like parasites over the last 30 to 50-years, when have they not been united?

Yes, even the Lamar County Chamber, supposedly, a “voluntary” organization, has had their hand in the local Occupancy Tax till, which is generating over $700,000 annually.

Voters have forgotten or don’t care that for years, the city leased the Depot building on Bonham Street to the Lamar County Chamber for one lousy dollar, annually. Then, after the chamber moved out, the PEDC still gave the bunch around $60,000 of the taxpayer’s money annually for “office space” – or some such silly excuse. It was an insider’s game at the taxpayer’s expense. All three organizations knew full well what they were doing and were okay with it – until the Paris Chamber exposed the unethical (and possibly an illegal action) that was going on.

After we pulled the plug, the three closed the funneling of tax dollars (in that manner) down, while griping about the Paris Chamber, which is the second best thing they do well.

Let’s face it: The three already walk and talk in-step. They seldom fuss, only brag about who has the power. They never dissent about issues, only power. And if that ain’t loving one another, then God didn’t make little green apples and it don’t rain in Indianapolis…

Branding, in the final analysis, only promotes or sells an identity. What they want to change is not how they do things, but the perception that people have of them.

But if you’re going to brand something, shouldn’t the first objective be that it is legitimate, functional, compelling, attractive, and different?

For years, they’ve believed their process is more important than Paris’ progress, and what we see them doing is just another process to make themselves look good.

For a decade the Paris Texas Chamber of Commerce has repeatedly said that Paris needs to restructure its community and economic development organizations, and given our reasons for the restructuring need: Property owners and tax-payers need a program that sells people on Paris, not on the existing organizations or on a series of some annual one-time event being held in Paris.

Branding failures are the state or condition of not meeting the intended objective or the expectations of people. It can also be viewed as a failure of the product.

The three organizations are only trying to brand a hope that people in the local marketplace will see them as hot stuff, the saviors of Paris.

But behind the perception they’re hoping for is a reality that these three have ridden Paris downhill for the last 50-years. Fix that, and the perception will fix itself.