If you ever wondered why places that are one-party Democrat fiefdoms (most rust-belt cities, for example) are so dysfunctional and miserable, John di Leo offers an explanation, that I think is in part on point, but misses another part. It’s a long article, but I’ll try and excerpt the main point.
In today’s case, we see the Left react to a very real problem – the downgrading of a city’s bond rating, which means that all new borrowing will become much more costly for the city than it was before – by identifying other very real problems – a plethora of empty buildings – without any hint that he knows why they’re empty or what steps are needed to fill them, without recognizing that these are all just more symptoms of other, deeper problems.
It is indeed the chicken-or-egg problem, on the grand scale. Chicago has lost about two-sevenths of its population since its high-water mark in the 1950s. Rather than seeming to care why the city is bleeding residents, it just looks on it as yet another challenge, not as a symptom of something else.
Ask the very same question of a conservative, and you would receive a very different answer.
Why was our bond rating downgraded again; what does this mean to us?
“That’s a softball question,” a conservative would reply. “it was downgraded because a city that’s been bleeding both population and jobs for generations, plagued with high crime, a greedy leviathan, and a welfare state population locked in stasis, is simply unsustainable. The idea that there’s enough duct tape in America to keep this wreck together indefinitely is obviously fiction.”
“But if you want a hardball question,” the conservative would continue, “ask how to solve it.”
Di Leo correctly identifies a symptom — the refusal of Democrats to govern in accordance with common sense principles of economics and the role of Government in providing basic services. But he doesn’t get into why Democrats govern that way.
Certainly, some of it is because politicians generally and Democrat politicians especially are corrupt. But even the ones who aren’t in it for the graft have motivations that are at odds with good governance. It’s not simply that they don’t grasp basic economics or the basic role of Government, it’s that theygo into Government with the goal of imposing a Utopian Ideology on everyone else, and being lauded for it by their peers in the media.
While Democrats go on endless crusades to “Fight Climate Change,” outlaw the private ownership of firearms, and ensure transgender bathroom equality… they neglect the necessary and unglamorous work of Government. I guess because People and Esquire don’t do fawning profiles of politicians who balance the budgets, fix the streets, and clean the deadweight out of state and municipal bureaucracies.
By the way, the Illinois “Human Rights Commission” has fined a Christian business owner $80,000 for declining to participate in a gay wedding. Freedom of speech and freedom of religious conscience are apparently not Human Rights, as far as the state of Illinois is concerned.
Why would a career politician enact policies designed to undermine his career? Leftists aren’t interested in solving problems; they exist and grow more powerful as these problems exist and become more pressing.
Leftists have always been destructive.
Bed and Breakfast places are the owners home. Could they really not find any gay Bed and Breakfast places? They are as stereotypical as lesbian all you can eat buffets.
Indeed, Steve. Even 20 years ago the joke was that every gay male couple wanted to quit their day jobs and move to a quaint seaside town or mountain village to open a bed-and-breakfast. Just think how many gay b&b’s have opened in the last 20 years.
Said it before, will say it again: the brain cells that run Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, etc. did not appoint themselves to office. They were elected, fair and square.
The electorate “thinks” hey, s/he’s promising free stuff and hates the successful as much as we do.
Reading Di Leo’s piece, he skates near enough to the issue – the people that live in Chicago – but then veers off course. When he writes that “schools” are gang-recruitment centers that need to be closed, he’s ignoring the fact that the school buildings aren’t hosting some mysterious miasma that turns good boys into hoodlums. There’s no such thing as magic dirt.
When frauds like Al Sharpton announce that they “fear for the streets” after BHO leaves office and are taken seriously by Big Thinkers well… to borrow a phrase from Charles Murray (panel discussion with Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone)), “I hope for a better outcome: I do not expect it.”
anybody that wants to see the future under liberalism just go to any inner-city in the united states to look around. there is your future.
how do you expect to get people out of poverty when liberals keep putting them into an economic system that rewards people on the basis of how needy they can make themselves. the answer is the politician doesn’t want them to get out of poverty. they like that permanent, bought and paid for vote too much. that bought and paid for vote is how the same crooked, corrupt, immoral, unethical, incompetent politician keeps getting elected election after election.