Obviously, the debt-to-income ratios are not going to get better anytime soon. These cities, already squalid, have the additional problem of capital flight and with each desertion, the problem continues to compound.
Cities originally evolved as machines to make money, by concentrating both capital and labor in close proximity. When working together, and using the principle of fair distribution of profits between the keepers of the capital and the labor that carried out the necessary tasks to assure that flow of goods and services that contribute to the profitability of the enterprises involved.
Capital had a duty, to include those who provide the day-to-day smooth operation of the business model by giving them a fair incentive to give their best and most productive attention to the job at hand, rewarding merit at every turn. Labor also has a duty, to provide the best efforts to the job at hand and that is not merely in terms of hours worked per week, or years on the job, but in really taking an interest in the business model that fits the mission statement of the organization created by capital.
With this bilateral co-operation, both capital and labor grow and expand. The seeds to failure of this co-operation lie in the dreams of avarice of those who have neither the capital nor the incentive to hire out in a productive manner, and a command and control scheme evolves, in which the outsider takes control of the dialogue between capital and labor, and sets them up as adversaries. To provide for the common good, of course, but more than that, to syphon off from the profits and incentives, through taxation and regulation, harness both capital and labor as their “mediator”. The mediator role takes on a life of its own and the original concept of the benevolent but patriarchal custodian of capital and the obedient but incentivized hirelings is lost. Jockeying for positions of “virtue”, the factions of capital and labor are forced to play out their roles as opponents, and not co-operative entities.
The mediators, of course, dole out favors to the custodians of the capital, by engaging them in public works, and seek favor from the providers by giving them benefits of one form or another, without regard to merit or profitability. And they take their cut, of course.
Some city government structures are more constrained than others, of course, but they all suffer from the same command-and-control schemes to a lesser or greater degree. The most successful cities have kept the meddling in the private capital sector to the very minimum, and to that degree, everybody prospers. But other city administrators have not shown the same constraint and they have becom dismal, squalid failures.
A very rational, well-stated explanation. Thanks very much, alloysteel. BUMP!
These situations with failing (Socialist Democrat) cities remind me of a computer game my boys and I used to play called ‘Sim City.’
We would design a city and get it up and running and functional (this took weeks, sometimes!) and it was very educational for the kids. You had to plan for roads and schools, collect taxes, build subdivisions, have adequate food and clean water; all that running a city entailed.
Then when we had things humming, we would set every man-made and natural disaster to happen overnight, and in the morning come back to a smoking pile of ash, LOL! Sometimes Godzilla would even show up.
And I’m CONVINCED that this is the reason one of my boys is now a City Planner. ;)