This Washington Post
article is, for the Post, a fairly nonpartisan look at the competition between red and blue states that are pursuing distinct strategies to solve social, economic, and political problems. The thesis is that the results of experimentation are getting a little clearer now that so many states have vested control of most or all of the state government in the hands of one party.
Read that this morning. The article may be mostly non-partisan and neutral. The comments, however, almost froth.
ReplyDelete*sigh*
Here's a question I'd like answered: how did Detroit become so important in the first place? I get why California and New York and Texas are, even Washington State: because of the harbors that enable international trade. Such border regions are natural places for industries to grow up that leverage international inequalities in capacity while minimizing shipping costs.
ReplyDelete(The same story, in the High Middle Ages, lies behind the rise of the Belgian cities who got rich trading with the English for wool, finishing it using continental techniques, and then selling the wool back to the English as garments.)
Some of these traditional Blue strongholds, though, don't have that explanation -- unless it's trade with Canada along the Great Lakes that made them rich.
So what's the explanation for how it became rich in the first place? We can agree that it was killed by some combination of rising costs (both regulatory and labor-union oriented) and globalization (so you could build the same stuff cheaper elsewhere and still sell in the original markets). But what made it work at all?
DL Sly beat me to it. The first comment:
ReplyDelete"Republican states have pursued economic and fiscal strategies built around lower taxes, deeper spending cuts and less regulation."
Translation, screw the poor, force religion on everyone, control every single aspect of a female's body, pollute all you want, and pay for nothing.
No surprise that many libs consider wingnuts the devil incarnate- at least the secular version of the devil.
I particularly like the "pay for nothing" part. Three generations on welfare are just fine, but someone who doesn't want to pay taxes for it is a freeloader.
ReplyDeleteGrim, my guess would be that Detroit happened to be where the fantastically profitable auto industry first got going, as a matter of chance. But they managed to kill that golden goose. What an armpit the place is now.
Well, it depends on how we define "freeloader". Normally we think of a freeloader as someone who receives something without giving anything back in return.
ReplyDeleteThe problem here is that these pesky taxpayers are benefiting from all this wonderful Social Justice and don't want to pay their bills! Justice used to be defined as getting what you deserve (have earned), but in this case everyone except the people paying for it deserves to get something for nothing.
Newspeak.
Grim, Chicago is also a port city that prospered due to good access, and everything that reaches Chicago by boat from the Atlantic passes by Detroit. It's a port city too, and situated between two great lakes- Erie and Huron, and it was once also the State Capital of Michigan. The rise of the automobile was icing on the cake (for a while, anyway).
ReplyDeleteWhy Detroit?: Great Lakes shipping for Coal, Coke, Iron Ore, and Steel.
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