ABSTRACT
As Peter K. Eisinger writes, "No longer a limited regional activity of industrially underdeveloped southern and New England states, economic development is now a universal public function". Early efforts to encourage industry via subsidy flagged by the 1830s, as Jacksonian laissez-faire triumphed over the Whiggish "American System" of state-sponsored enterprise, and by the latter half of the nineteenth century infrastructure improvements, especially the building of rail lines, were the primary target of state subvention. Perhaps surprisingly, the state-level pioneer in subsidizing specific industries was not Massachusetts or New York or any other reputed bastion of progressivism but rather Mississippi, which in the Depression year of 1936 inaugurated the Balance Agriculture with Industry program. Politicians and economic development activists are likely to see voluntary regional compacts as acts of unilateral disarmament in the corporate welfare war. A national legislative ban on the weapons used in interstate economic development bidding wars would pass constitutional muster.
