Your Logo Here

Used to be the only commercial signs you saw on public property were ones like "Morty's Mortuary" on a bus stop bench or "The East Goulash City Daily Times-Tribune-Mirror-Press-Herald-News-Telegraph-Gazette" on the sides of city busses. Then came the great stadium naming game. DottKomm Park. Corporation R Us Arena. Marshall Field's Field.

But city, county and state governments, who spent like drunken bureaucrats when times were good, are willing to sell every square inch of municipal space if it means another buck in their budgets. San Diego CA gulped down $1.5 million in exchange for a Pepsi monopoly in the 475 soda machines on city property. Coke is the "official beverage" of Huntington Beach CA and East Lansing MI. And a Charlotte NC company donates cop cruisers and ambulances smothered with advertising.

Gary Ruskin of Commercial Watch complains that this practice turns a city into "a tawdry huckster." But citizens might counter with, "Better than raising our taxes - again!" Especially if the naming rights are sold not only to the highest, but to the most appropriate, bidder:

The History Channel County Museum

Nabisco Animal Crackers City Zoo

Superglue Municipal Thoroughbred Race Track

Northern Tissue Sewage Treatment Plant #1

A Phoenix AZ city official, looking to cozy up to a corporate sugar daddy, hastens to promise, "This will not turn our vehicles into something that looks like a NASCAR car." But why not? Cops have always been wannabe racers. We're constantly treated to TV helicopter-eye-views of high speed chases on our metropolitan freeways. Why not a police interceptor plastered with Goodyear and Pennzoil, Interstate Batteries, Bosch and Moog and Napa? Why shouldn't that shiny red fire engine say Tonka Toys on its sides? Why shouldn't the fleet of city garbage trucks be emblazoned with "Burger King?" (Well, okay, that last one could be a hard sell.)

Another detractor of this logo-for-loot swap meet is David Bollier who complains, "It goes down a dangerous path because it's selling off the public good." Bollier is author of a book entitled Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth. I don't know what the book is about, but the only "common wealth" I'm aware of is the tax money that government not so silently plunders from its private citizens. So when Bollier protests, "Should all institutions be open to the highest bidder?" libertarians, especially those of the anarchistic bent, are likely to respond with a resounding "yes!"

But there is a danger with this money for monopoly movement, in that it's yet another example of the infamous "public/private partnership" in which corporations and bureaucrats win while individuals lose. I'd have no problem driving around with license plates that read "Texas -- Tastes Great, Less Filling" if Miller Lite was picking up the tab for my tags. But what our public serpents want is corporate money in addition to, not instead of, our tax dollars. They want to roll everyone.

So Gary Ruskin of Commercial Watch gets it backwards when he decries the fact that San Diego has beach patrol trucks sporting giant Chevrolet emblems and the catchphrase "Official Vehicle of the San Diego Lifeguards." It's not that they've gone too far. They haven't gone far enough. Sell the whole damned beach to Chevy. Let them put their signs everywhere. Then sublease the snack shacks to McWendyKing and Taco Bender, franchise the beach umbrellas to Shady Deals International Trading Company and sell logo space on the canvass chairs and beach towels to the highest bidder. And then make the city cut taxes accordingly.

Would you rather pay taxes to keep up your neighborhood park, or give the park to a lawn mower company who renames it John Deere Commons? Benches with ads might be provided by local lawn care companies like Luther's Landscaping or Yancey's Yard 'N Garden Service. And who knows, maybe Splash & Splatter Pools and Spas will build a little fountain -- using Acme Brick, of course. And, for a fee, Cargill might sign on as "The Official Plant and Shrub Fertilizer of John Deere Commons."

So are we really going down a dangerous path, as David Bollier warns, because we're "selling off the public good?" Not if the path is "An Official American Concrete Pavement Contractors Association Path." Not if it means that government taxing, along with their intrusion into every crook and nanny of our lives, shrinks in direct proportion to the expansion of corporate sponsorship. We'll be selling off the public bad.

(Full disclosure: this was an "Official La-Z-Butt Writer's Chair Article.")