Detriot in ruins
Last month, I remarked on Detroit’s astounding decline. Last week, they made it official: Detroit is in bankruptcy court.
The fetching and clever Steven Crowder looks at the causes of Detroit’s decades-long decline:
Here’s the short answer: Decades of Big Government…Leftists…Unions. It turns out that government interventions, subsidies and bailouts don’t help people to live better lives and build better cities; in the long run, they subsidize inefficiency, failure and crime. Who knew?
Related tidbits:
- Cuts to Detroit government workers’ salaries and pensions are thought to be mathematically inevitable now.
- Not to worry, though: Left-wing Congressmen and judges are busy telling Detroit, you’re not allowed to do that. Find another way. Repeal the laws of math. Do…something! (Via HotAir.)
- For some reason, Obama let the City’s bankruptcy happen and is not talking bailout…yet.
- But do you remember when Romney was pilloried for saying he’d let Detroit go bankrupt?
- In the last six decades, Detroit has lost nearly two-thirds of its peak population and 9/10 of its manufacturing jobs.
- Leftists are here to tell us, Orwell-style, that it all happened because Detroit’s government is…too small! It doesn’t tax enough!
After listening to that last one, I need to contemplate humanity’s doom at the hands of our new Robot overlords.
UPDATE: As a study in opposites, I bring you the perennially-booming Texas.
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Detroit is the end-result of 75-years of the unholy-alliance of leftist “big-city boosterism”, public-unionism, and the middleclass voting with it’s feet.
Comment by Ted B. (Charging Rhino) — July 20, 2013 @ 11:03 pm - July 20, 2013
It’s Here! The Royal Baby Hospital Cam (Watch Live)…
http://commoncts.blogspot.com/2013/07/its-here-royal-baby-hospital-cam-watch.html
Comment by Steve — July 20, 2013 @ 11:10 pm - July 20, 2013
From the looks of things Chicago’s starting to follow the Detroit model. I wonder what will happen when the feral pigs get into Detroit. I’ve been paying attention to the rise of the MegaHogs in the South, I think things will get very bad in Detroit. They can’s protect people from wild dogs there now. And pigs will eat people they just aren’t good at killing us quickly.
Comment by Catseye — July 20, 2013 @ 11:26 pm - July 20, 2013
Could it be the One Thing Everyone Is Afraid To Mention?
Comment by EssEm — July 21, 2013 @ 1:37 am - July 21, 2013
What is this “math” you speak of?
What the hell does that have to do with Detroit?
Comment by Rattlesnake — July 21, 2013 @ 1:58 am - July 21, 2013
He would have been pilloried in any case (it was, after all, the Dems favorite sport in 2012), but he was speaking in terms of metonymy, referencing not the community itself, but the dominiant industry so long associated with same,
as pointed out in Slate.
Comment by RSG — July 21, 2013 @ 5:43 am - July 21, 2013
You left out another factor leftists are blaming Detroit’s collapse on: White People (Ignore the head line, check out the name in the link.) Specifically, the unwillingness of middle-class white people to live in a city with high taxes, terrible public services, and a corrupt political power structure that is overtly hostile to them.
Pardon me, lefties, but isn’t it quite racist to claim that a city just can’t function without white people?
Comment by V the K — July 21, 2013 @ 9:52 am - July 21, 2013
Stupidity is colorblind.
Comment by Ignatius — July 21, 2013 @ 11:05 am - July 21, 2013
Race is an exceedingly poor way to classify people. That’s why I hate it, when leftists do it so much. The boundaries of any alleged “race” are nebulous and arbitrary (as we see in the cases of George Zimmerman and, for that matter, President Obama). The differences among individuals within any alleged “race” are much larger and more important than the differences between the alleged “races”. Therefore, every individual must be judged as an individual. The racial problems of the world come not from race X or Y, but from race hucksterism – the hucksters who promote the cultural and ideological stupidity that is “race”, including racial divisions and grievances. Leave all of it to the Left.
Comment by ILoveCapitalism — July 21, 2013 @ 11:20 am - July 21, 2013
It’s hard for me not to point and chuckle at the left. Seriously, there is no point at which you’ll admit your ideas don’t work? If liberal economic ideas were functional, Europe would be also. Just that simple. We were effectively saved from becoming Europe by Republican legislators. I am not a Republican, but this thought keeps me voting for them.
Comment by Carolynp — July 21, 2013 @ 5:00 pm - July 21, 2013
From Onion, seven years ago…
http://www.theonion.com/articles/detroit-sold-for-scrap,1931/
It takes decades for bad policies and politics to take their toll on an industry and a city. That’s the unfortunate thing about policy debates. As Sowell says, politicians (and I think all leftists) suffer from the disease of stage-one thinking — they can only look at the immediate outcome of a decision, and do not comprehend that there will be ramifications and unintended consequences down the road, which sometimes take decades, if not centuries, to unfold. People acknowledge that they cannot control so many aspects of existence (weather and other people, to name two), but somehow think they can control the economy.
Comment by Jane Austen — July 21, 2013 @ 5:05 pm - July 21, 2013
Note to mike, another_jeremy, brubeck, rusty, and all the other “progressives” who occasionally stop by and wet their pants here: Detroit is a SHINING EXAMPLE of what your ideology and policy ideas lead to.
Oh, wait. I’m sure they’re convinced it’s all “George Bush’s fault.”
Comment by Bastiat Fan — July 21, 2013 @ 7:12 pm - July 21, 2013
They’ve been pretty quiet since their talking points about St. Skittles have been demolished.
Comment by V the K — July 21, 2013 @ 7:56 pm - July 21, 2013
I will be called a racist, but name one well run town that is majority black.
Comment by davinci — July 21, 2013 @ 8:29 pm - July 21, 2013
Pointing to an anecdote doesn’t make you a racist any more than, say, any kind of pattern recognition; drawing larger conclusions such as stereotyping an entire race based upon such evidence is racist, which is what is being implied in this thread. It might be said that such evidence makes it hard not to make a connection between bodily chemicals and civic ineptitude, but that’s only because doing so is too easy. There are far more compelling explanations than surface correlation, even if the correlation nears 100%.
Comment by Ignatius — July 21, 2013 @ 9:08 pm - July 21, 2013
Davinci, you’re called a racist..and a homophone for that matter if you don’t bow
down to the left.
Comment by TomB — July 21, 2013 @ 9:11 pm - July 21, 2013
Detroit is ‘Atlas Shrugged’ come to life.
Comment by V the K — July 21, 2013 @ 9:17 pm - July 21, 2013
Most of the alleged white/asian/jewish vs. black/hispanic differences disappear, when you look at stastistical averages corrected for one factor: economic status.
That raises the question of why do whites/jews/asians seem to have a better average economic outcome than blacks/hispanics. But the answers there, too, tend not to validate any inherent racial differences; the strongest answers tend to be political and historical/cultural.
I don’t mean that, the way the Left means it. In other words, I don’t mean that blacks and hispanics (or poor people generally – including many whites) are held back by some “rich straight white male conservative” bogeyman.
I mean, rather, that they are held back by what in today’s world is the rich, *liberal* bogeyman: by Big Government. Socialism/leftism is a giant trick by which the “lazy rich” have deceived the poor (buying their votes) while denying them opportunity and actually keeping them mired in poverty.
That is why the *heirs* of the productive rich – think trust fund babies, the Kennedy and Rockefeller kids – are so often drawn to left-liberalism. They know, deep down, that it functions to keep them on top and the poor, suppressed. While it pretends not to.
It is the misfortune of many blacks, Hispanics and poor whites to be vulnerable to the deception – for reasons which are basically historical and cultural. So they’re stuck.
But all of the alleged “races” do well, and turn out lots of successful and responsible citizens, under a government which is effective in protecting individual rights to life, liberty and property – and which is otherwise small, doing little for people.
The way forward for the conservative movement is to promote color-blindness (blindness to race), small government, and the impartial protection of individual rights under the rule of law, as *populist* causes that help the poor, among others. Which they are!
Comment by ILoveCapitalism — July 21, 2013 @ 11:41 pm - July 21, 2013
The Democratic People’s Republic of Illinois now requires you to buy a license to use your inner tube.
This is what unchecked, one-party socialist rule gets you.
Comment by V the K — July 22, 2013 @ 7:42 am - July 22, 2013
ILC, I read once (no link sorry) that assimilation is the key to success.
Not ‘losing your culture’ but being able to function in society. It also pointed out that most (legal!) immigrants assimilate into the society in two generations, and see their fortunes rise. The exception are immigrants from the West Indies/Africa. Usually you see the first and second generation do well, bust hteir humps, etc. then the third and so on start to buy into the victim mentalilty.
Comment by The_Livewire — July 22, 2013 @ 9:06 am - July 22, 2013
TL, agreed.
I just came back to say again that ‘race hucksterism’ is a real problem, and I’m open to an argument, as in the following piece from Thomas Sowell, that too many 21st-century blacks have chosen to become caught up in that: http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2013/07/09/who-is-racist-n1636228/page/full
Comment by ILoveCapitalism — July 22, 2013 @ 9:26 am - July 22, 2013
Confiscate Michael Moore’s fortune to pay the debt!!!!!!!!
Comment by SC.Swampfox — July 22, 2013 @ 11:05 am - July 22, 2013
Didn’t you know that Detroit had a very small government and was a conservative utopia? Detroit is what conservatism gets you.
Comment by Rattlesnake — July 22, 2013 @ 2:56 pm - July 22, 2013
[...] Detriot in ruins [...]
Pingback by GayPatriot » Do they actually believe what they’re saying? — July 23, 2013 @ 3:19 pm - July 23, 2013
Meanwhile, in the nation’s largest city—which has seen an incompetent bureaucrat, an effective prosecutor (and mayor), and a successful (though misguided) entrepreneur at its helm over the past 20 years—the two leading contenders to shepherd it into its next fiscal crisis are a politician who, in her get-to-know-me recent book spent three chapters discussing her lesbian wedding and a pugnacious former congresscritter who can’t seem to keep his hands off his smartphone camera nor pointed away from his privates and who once again trots out a long-suffering wife to help him atone for his sins. Do either one realize they are running for CEO of one of the largest nonprofit companies in the world, not for seventh-grade class president?!
[Did I mention that both are hardcore Democrats? Did I need to?]
Who knew that the real proof for the Domino Theory wasn’t 20th century communism, but 21st century single-party machine politics as allowed to expand in the management of US large-city governments?
Comment by RSG — July 23, 2013 @ 8:50 pm - July 23, 2013