Taxpayer handouts for a $125 million downtown arena is socialism for the rich. It's a giveaway to private investors and a barrier to urban renewal.

Put aside for a moment the hype and glamour of a new arena and consider who's on the hook. The make-work project is a $30 million and counting direct transfer from the pockets of taxpayers into the hands of the True North Project - a consortium of private sector investors. Red flags should be shooting up for Manitoba taxpayers shanghaied into beefing up investment returns for a collection of business interests.

It's safe to say that without the handout, the arena would be toast. If the project were such a fantastic moneymaker, the owners wouldn't need to queue up to the trough of public subsidies.

Let the private sector risk the full capital costs and reap the rewards. It's called capitalism and free enterprise - a seemingly old fashion idea to the architects of the deal.

You would expect as much from Manitoba politicians awestruck by the chance to play central-planner. But to see some of the province's more successful entrepreneurs pressing for handouts is a sorry sight. It's a shame the socialist ethos has even laid claim to the so-called Manitoba risk-takers.

Governments like nothing more than to be stroked into financing a pseudo public works project like the arena. It gives politicians a new lease on life and reinforces the belief that life can't go on without government intervention. Maybe not in Manitoba but elsewhere it does.

Canada is chalk full of examples where arenas were built without the dead hand of government guiding the way. In the 1990s, Toronto's Air Canada Centre, Montreal's Molson Centre and Vancouver's General Motors Place all came into existence with next to no taxpayer assistance. The record shows that private sector arenas can be built and sustained by popular demand.

Winnipeg's aging demographics, shrinking disposable incomes and relatively small market size puts a new 15,000-seat arena squarely in the category of white elephant. Manitoba politicians can help turn things around not by baiting investors with handouts but by releasing the tax burden that prevents the business community from acting independent of government.

Less young Manitobans will defect to other provinces. They'll have more cash to spend on concerts and sporting events. And investors will less likely flinch at the prospect of fronting a greater share of the arena costs themselves.

The other option is to nickel and dime Manitoba taxpayers to build a shiny new arena enveloped by a decaying downtown. Only one of two outcomes can occur.

The magic of the arena snaps local merchants and consumers out of their lethargy and reawakens downtown development by forces unknown to nature. Or the disease of urban decay eventually takes its toll on the new arena itself, forever subsidized by taxpayers who rarely if ever frequent the building. Like the perpetually-subsidized Winnipeg Convention Centre, the arena will become a temple to waste.

The direction charted out by the Tue North Project and the politicians who've signed on to the arena deal is more of the same old. Nothing will change or improve in Winnipeg by trotting out the same hopeless taxpayer-funded panaceas for urban renewal.

Politicians would be wiser to release the tax burden and over-regulation that indentures Manitoba's entrepreneurs to Godfather governments and the bait of taxpayer subsidies. If True North genuinely believes the people will come let them build the arena themselves.