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They say that acknowledging you have a problem is the first step on the long road to recovery. Is Seattle’s socialist Mayor Katie Wilson ready to reckon with the reasons why some of the city’s greatest entrepreneurs don’t live there anymore? In March this column noted that former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who built the Seattle coffee purveyor into a global giant, had relocated to Florida and that Starbucks was expanding its corporate footprint in Tennessee. In a recent Journal op-ed titled “Seattle Turns Hostile to the Great Businesses It Made,” Mr. Schultz wrote: Washington’s economic story over the past half century is extraordinary. Microsoft, Amazon, Costco and a host of other new companies transformed the state into a global center of technology, innovation and logistics. Entrepreneurs exported ideas worldwide. Capital flowed. Wages rose. Imported and homegrown talent flourished. That ecosystem worked because risk‑taking was rewarded, growth was possible, and civic leadership—while imperfect—understood that private enterprise wasn’t the adversary of the public good… That ecosystem is fractured today… Seattle’s mayor, Katie Wilson, has chosen to cast business as a foil rather than a partner. Her socialist rhetoric vilifies employers, even while she continues to rely on them for revenue. She has encouraged residents who disagree with her policies to leave. In the state capital, the Legislature and governor have confronted difficult fiscal trade-offs by
emphasizing taxation rather than reform or performance management. The theory appears to be that prosperity can be mandated through redistribution rather than generated through growth.
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