Kevin Williamson wonders why progressives can't see what their own policies are doing to the cities whose conditions they so deplore:
Newark, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles — and Philadelphia, Cleveland, and a dozen or more other cities — have a great deal in common: They are the places in which the progressive vision of government has reached its fullest expressions. They are the hopeless reality that results from wishful thinking.
. . . [T]he Reverend Jackson is undoubtedly correct in identifying “a national crisis of urban abandonment and repression.” He neglects to point out that he is an important enabler of it.
Philadelphia, for example, has not had a Republican mayor since the Truman administration. It did enjoy the services of Mayor Frank Rizzo, a Democrat who endorsed Nixon in exchange for federal handouts and who governed in the progressive style: He converted a private utility into a public one and promptly turned it into a patronage machine, he was close with the labor unions and raised the city’s wage tax to fund spending on transportation and infrastructure projects, worked for economic benefits for the elderly, etc. He was a classic welfare-statist Democrat — and a man who, as police commissioner, famously promised to “make Attila the Hun look like a fag.” (Rizzo later ran as a Republican.) It wasn’t a right-wing radical who bombed a Philadelphia rowhouse and burned down the neighborhood — it was an African-American progressive, Wilson Goode. Closet Ayn Rand fans have not been running the affairs of Detroit all these years, and the intellectual patrons of the Chicago Boys have had approximately zero influence on the municipal affairs of Chicago. Ralph Reed will never be the mayor of San Francisco.
. . . The philosophy of abusive eminent domain, government monopolies, and opportunistic taxation is also the philosophy of police brutality, the repression of free speech and other constitutional rights, and economic despair. Frank Rizzo was not a paradox — he was an inevitability. When life is reduced to the terms in which it is lived in the poorest and most neglected parts of Chicago or Detroit, the welfare state is the police state. Why should we expect the agents of the government who carry guns and badges to be in general better behaved than those at the IRS or the National Labor Relations Board?
3 comments:
... the welfare state is the police state.
I was reflecting, at the grocery store, about how different the relationship is of the welfare classes to the state. They are accustomed to the state intruding in every aspect of their lives -- from investigating the insides of their homes and seizing their children if they so desire, to telling them what kinds of foods it is acceptable for them to purchase (a reflection occasioned by the 'WIC approved' tags in the produce section).
Currently, Wikipedia claims, WIC serves more than half of American-born infants.
How do we hold on to the remnants of freedom in a country that has accepted such intimate intrusions from the state in their everyday lives?
They can't see? That's like saying a person can't see the debits on their credit card history.
They can see what's going on. It's obvious, cause their bank accounts are overflowing from the loot in the cities, those Democrat overseers people like to vote for, acclaim, and throw triumphs for.
I'm not very impressed with this article. One, cities have always both places people want to go to, and, places people want to leave.
The cities haven't been "lost" in any meaningful sense of the word, not even Detroit.
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