Chicago tried something new this year.

For the first time ever, on the weekend before Independence Day, the city of Chicago hosted a NASCAR street race — yes, in downtown Chicago, one of the best known business, shopping, and entertainment districts in the world.

This isn't something that the voters chose consciously; it's a decision made by the last city government, the office of the recently defeated Mayor Lori Lightfoot.  Chicagoans have been referring to the event as Lightfoot's last attack on the people of Chicago.

Events like this take weeks to set up, so driving barriers and temporary viewing stands have been erected, disrupting traffic for weeks.  Chicago traffic is always a challenge, even worse now than usual with a massive repaving project in process on the Kennedy Expressway (the highway connecting downtown Chicago with O'Hare Airport).  Summer traffic normally swells with tourists already; Chicago hardly needed the added snarl of extensive NASCAR road closures in one of the most congested areas in the country.

The massive street race footprint swept past or encircled museums, offices, retail shops, and entertainment venues big and small.  Some rolled the dice and hoped they would still get business; others anticipated disaster and closed for the duration.

As for the event itself — well, one would like to say it went off without a hitch, but, as virtually everyone outside the mayor's office predicted, it was a disaster.

Chicago is known the world over for reasonably heavy precipitation; a city that gets snow in the winter is obviously susceptible to rain in the summer.  Some of the rain this particular weekend was record-setting, but it shouldn't have surprised anyone.

The downpours themselves, combined with the resulting rain delays and cancelations, resulted in races having to be shortened from the intended 100 laps to just 75.  Planned concerts were canceled outright.  Pit crews watched tires float away as the waters rose along the route.

Already a dangerous sport, drivers, sponsors, and fans alike were furious at being forced into a competition designed with so little apparent concern for safety.

YouTube screen grab.

The news story will be that it was just a bust — a well intended big idea that happened to run into competition with Mother Nature.

Who is there to blame?  A mayor who not only has already been denied a second term, but has been the undeserving recipient of a ridiculous golden parachute: She'll be a thousand miles east, teaching at Harvard.  And the NASCAR leadership?  They've been trying to arrange a street race in a big city for years.  They may be able to blame the weather for the whole debacle and escape the blame they deserve for this disaster.

The story will likely end there.  Hard news will report the announced winners and move on.  Sports media will report in detail on the conditions, the losses, the hardships, and then move on.  Internet media may report feature stories about the poor sound technician killed by electrocution.  Maybe a travel story or two will show up on social media about families who traveled to Chicago only to have their vehicles or luggage washed away in the storm.

But there's a story we won't see reported, one that economists sometimes call the law of unseen consequences.  Bastiat illustrated it with the parable of the broken window.  When a window is broken, you see the homeowner or shopkeeper hire a glazier to replace the window.  You do not see all the other businesses that lose whatever sales they would have enjoyed from that homeowner or shopkeeper if he had still had that cash in hand. 

In today's dollars, instead of spending $500 on that window repair, he might have taken his family out to dinner a few times, or bought a painting or statue for his shop or home, or enrolled his son or daughter in a class, or taken the family to a Broadway show.  The broken window stopped these other transactions from happening.  The restaurateur, the artist, the trade school, the theater — all lost business.  They don't see it, they may not know why, but they are a bit less successful because they lost a sale because of a broken window.

This is what happened to Chicago this summer, all because Lori Lightfoot used the power of her office to bring NASCAR to Chicago on the weekend of July 1.

Chicago is a tourist destination, with exciting architectural tours, professional theatre, world-class restaurants, terrific museums, galleries, and aquariums, and enough hotel rooms to accommodate business and personal travelers alike.

This time of year is among their busiest.  If there are times of year when they need help from some unusual new event, this isn't one of them.

While this NASCAR event certainly brought some business to Chicago, it also drove some away.  Numerous venues, both public and private, recognizing the likelihood of a Chicago tied up in knots, closed down for the weekend, preferring to give up the potential business of that weekend to risking their employees being unable to make it to work.

The restaurants and bars of downtown Chicago depend on customers who are themselves downtown workers; countless downtown firms took advantage of remote work methods to close down their offices and let their employees stay in the suburbs for a few weeks until the barriers are down and life is back to normal.

Fine for them, but not so fine for the lunch and dinner hour businesses that count on that clientele.

So it has been for all the tourist trade these past couple of weeks.  While NASCAR certainly brought in some clientele, it drove off plenty as well.  Proving a negative is the hardest chore in statistics; there will be published reports of how many new attendees NASCAR brought to town, with no corresponding report of how many tourists and regulars it drove out.

An even greater lesson, however, may not be in who was driven out, but in who did attend, but was able to do less than usual, because of this event.

Picture the family that planned to come to town for shopping, meals, museums, and watching the race.  They still came to town, but with roads closed and traffic snarled, they spent more time sitting in traffic than they'd budgeted. 

There are only so many hours in the day; something had to give.  Some families skipped the shopping; some skipped the theater.  Some skipped the museums; some skipped the nightlife.  When you find yourself with one or two hours less in your day, all because of an archipelago of temporary road barriers, tents, and bleachers in your way, half your itinerary gets scrapped.

These are the real losers in the 2023 Chicago NASCAR street race: the department stores and specialty shops, cooks and waiters, museums and bars, actors and singers, who have fewer customers this month than they would have, if only Mayor Lori Lightfoot hadn't had the power to impose a costly, foolish, dangerous idea on the city of Chicago.

Should Chicago's mayor have such power?

The Founding Fathers believed in small government, constitutionally limited government, a government so tiny that it is limited in what it can do other than provide the most basic of services.

For those who are paying attention, this NASCAR event is an excellent illustration of why the Founding Fathers were right.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation professional and consultant.  A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009.  His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I and II) are available on Amazon.