Once upon a time progressives were outraged at the corporate welfare that the state of Florida and local government entities showered on Disney over the years.
Commentary
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has a major legal victory in his pocket. A federal district judge dismissed a lawsuit by the Disney corporation challenging the state of Florida’s efforts to wrest back control of the sweetheart-deal special improvement district that Disney had carved out for itself in 1967 when it created the Walt Disney World governing district.
The ruling, by U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor, upholds the Florida Legislature’s termination in 2023 of an arrangement that had allowed Disney to operate its own government-within-a-government with nearly complete sway over the 43 square miles of central Florida—about twice the size of Manhattan and nearly the size of San Francisco—that contain its theme parks and resorts. Disney had argued that voiding the arrangement amounted to wrongful government retaliation against Disney for exercising its First Amendment free-speech rights. Disney had opposed a DeSantis-sponsored parental-rights law enacted in 2022 that forbids discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in kindergarten through third-grade classrooms at Florida public schools.
LGBT activists and other progressives have derided the “Don’t Say Gay” law, as they call it. They pounced on Mr. DeSantis and his allies for supposedly punishing Disney. But Judge Winsor ruled that the 2023 legislation, which simply withdrew Disney’s special privileges that had been created by the Florida legislature in the first place, was constitutional on its face. It couldn’t be held unconstitutional just because its supporters allegedly had improper motives, Judge Winsor
wrote. (Disney has appealed.)
The ruling wasn’t just a triumph for Mr. DeSantis, whose liberal critics had gleefully predicted would be outmaneuvered in court by Disney’s amply funded legal team. It was also a revelation—of how the progressive left’s stance toward large corporations, which up until recently was uniformly hostile, has changed overnight to glowingly adulatory now that many corporations have gone woke.
“The [Disney] episode has demonstrated many of DeSantis’ authoritarian traits,” Mother Jones reporter Pema Levy
scolded in 2023. “His desire to be dominant, even over the private sector; to impose his ideology on Florida, including its businesses ...”
The openly progressive Mother Jones taking the side of “the private sector”? In the form of $89 billion Disney? Welcome to the brave new world of progressive love of Big Business.
The irony here is rich, because the 56-year-old Florida–Disney special relationship had been a textbook example of what’s been called
crony capitalism: a government’s handing out tax and other benefits to a private business in return for a promise of job-generating economic development. It’s highly common, as various cities’ efforts to lure Amazon to build facilities within their boundaries indicate. Free-market conservatives have criticized this kind of government favoritism for stifling competition to the detriment of consumers. But the main critics of crony capitalism have typically been liberals. They’ve accused the arrangements of starving localities of tax dollars and conferring the promised economic benefits mostly on corporate management and shareholders.
The creation of Disney World was certainly a Republican enterprise. Disney founder Walt Disney didn’t want to repeat his experience with Disney World’s older-sister campus, Disneyland, in Anaheim, California. Disneyland occupies only 500 acres, and soon after its 1955 opening, hotels, restaurants, and other entertainment sites sprang up nearby to take economic advantage of their proximity to the theme park. Walt Disney wanted all that economic benefit for his own company. So during the early 1960s, using dummy corporations, he quietly bought up, at rock-bottom prices, the 27,500 acres in central Florida that are today’s Disney World complex. Back then it was mostly swampland.
Then, with the help of Florida’s late Republican Gov. Claude R. Kirk Jr., a flamboyant former businessman, Disney, and after his death in 1966, the Disney company, pushed through the Florida Legislature the Reedy Creek Improvement District, an independent special district with its own taxing authority that would operate completely autonomously from city and county governments. It manages its own roads, sewage system, and fire department. It issues tax-free municipal bonds to finance its construction. Disney also persuaded the state of Florida and the nearby city of Orlando to
build freeway interchanges connecting to roads leading to its parks.
Legislatively created special improvement districts are common in Florida—there are 1,192 of them—but they typically exist to manage specific public services: water, mosquito control, hospitals, libraries. Reedy Creek is unique in that it’s the only special improvement district operated for the benefit of a private, profit-making entity. And, in fact, there’s no “public” to be served in Reedy Creek. Only
53 people actually live there as permanent residents, almost all of them part of Disney management. The
17 million tourists who visit the complex every year love its clean streets and the green spaces and blue lakes where swamps used to be—but the millions they spend there daily go straight into Disney’s coffers.
Once upon a time progressives were outraged at the corporate welfare that the state of Florida and local government entities showered on Disney over the years. In a 1998 book, “
Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World,“ novelist Carl Hiaasen blasted Disney for persuading Florida legislators to ”blitheringly agree to give the company whatever it wanted.” But when the Florida Legislature renamed Reedy Creek the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District in 2023 and replaced its Disney-handpicked board with members who would be more accountable to Florida’s voters, the liberal New Republic pronounced the move “bizarre.” Such was the power of progressive ideology—at least with respect to LGBT activism—over progressives’ proclaimed principles.
Crony capitalism seems to be bad—but crony woke capitalism is just fine.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
