Posted on 08/15/2014 9:22:30 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The Reverend Jesse Jackson is, to the surprise of all thinking people, right about something: “A spark has exploded,” he said, referring to the protests and violence in Ferguson, Mo. “When you look at what sparked riots in the Sixties, it has always been some combination of poverty, which was the fuel, and then some oppressive police tactic. It was the same in Newark, in Chicago, in Detroit, in Los Angeles. It’s symptomatic of a national crisis of urban abandonment and repression, seen in Chicago.”
A question for the Reverend Jackson: Who has been running the show in Newark, in Chicago, in Detroit, and in Los Angeles for a great long while now? The answer is: People who see the world in much the same way as does the Reverend Jackson, who take the same view of government, who support the same policies, and who suffer from the same biases.
This is not intended to be a cheap partisan shot. The Democratic party institutionally certainly has its defects, the chronicle of which could fill several unreadable volumes, but the more important and more fundamental question here is one of philosophy and policy. 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.
Ferguson was hardly a happy suburban garden spot until the shooting of Michael Brown. Ferguson is about two-thirds black, and 28 percent of those black residents live below the poverty line. The median income is well below the Missouri average, and Missouri is hardly the nation’s runaway leader in economic matters. More than 60 percent of the births in the city of St. Louis (and about 40 percent in St. Louis County) are out of wedlock.
My reporting over the past few years has taken me to Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, St. Louis and the nearby community of East St. Louis, Ill., Philadelphia, Detroit, Stockton, San Francisco, and a great many other cities, and the 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.
For years, our major cities were undermined by a confluence of four unhappy factors: 1. higher taxes; 2. defective schools; 3. crime; 4. declining economic opportunity. Together, these weighed much more heavily upon the middle class than upon the very wealthy and the very poor. In the case of Philadelphia, the five counties in the metropolitan area have had a mostly stable population, but the city itself lost more than a quarter of its population between 1950 and 2000 as some 550,000 people fled to the suburbs or beyond. How many people matters, but which people matters, too: They were the ones with the means and the strongest incentive to relocate. Over the same period of time, Chicago lost a fifth of its population, Baltimore nearly a third. Philadelphia is one of the few U.S. cities to impose a municipal income tax (one of the taxes Mayor Rizzo raised), creating very strong incentives to move across the line into Delaware County or Bucks County. This is sometimes known as “white flight,” but that is a misnomer: In Detroit, the white middle class got out as quickly as it could — and the black middle class was hot on its heels. Upwardly mobile people and those who expect to be — i.e., those with an investment in the future — care a great deal about schools, economic opportunity, and safety. And they know where the city limits are.
Progressives spent a generation imposing taxes and other expenses on urban populations as though the taxpaying middle class would not relocate. They protected the defective cartel system of public education, and the union money and votes associated with it, as though middle-class parents would not move to places that had better schools. They imposed burdens on businesses, in exchange for more union money and votes, as though businesses would not shift production elsewhere. They imposed policies that disincentivized stable family arrangements as though doing so would have no social cost.
And they did so while adhering to a political philosophy that holds that the state, not the family or the market, is the central actor in our lives, that the interests of private parties — be they taxpayers or businesses — can and indeed must be subordinated to the state’s interests, as though individuals and families were nothing more than gears in the great machine of politics. 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? We have city councils that conduct their affairs in convenient secrecy and put their own interests above those of the communities that they allege to serve, and yet we naïvely think that when that self-serving process is used to hire a police commissioner or to organize a police department, then we’ll get saints and Einsteins out of all that muck.
The more progressive the city, the worse a place it is to be poor and/or black. The most pronounced economic inequality in the United States is not in some Republican redoubt in Texas but in San Francisco, an extraordinarily expensive city in which half of all black households make do with less than $25,000 a year. Blacks in San Francisco are arrested on drug felonies at ten times their share of the general population. At 6 percent of the population, they represent 40 percent of those arrested for homicides. Whether you believe that that is the result of a racially biased criminal-justice system or the result of higher crime incidence related to socioeconomic conditions within black communities (or some combination of those factors) what is undeniable is that results for black Americans are far worse in our most progressive, Democrat-dominated cities than they are elsewhere. The progressives have had the run of things for a generation in these cities, and the results are precisely what you see.
Our cities need economic growth and opportunity, functional education systems, and physical security. And where have our few urban success stories come from? We saw a dramatic turnabout in crime and public disorder in New York under Republican Rudy Giuliani, and we’ve seen periods of relatively good governance in two-party cities such as San Diego. At the moment, our most prosperous cities are those such as Houston, cities that are themselves Democrat-dominated but embedded in heavily Republican metropolitan areas or states, and which govern in a way that is much friendlier to enterprise and middle-class interests than is the style that has long predominated in places such as Philadelphia or Detroit.
The Reverend Jackson should not be surprised that places such as Ferguson, Mo., have feckless police departments. He himself has spent his career helping to ensure that they have feckless schools, self-serving bureaucracies, rapacious public-sector unions pillaging the municipal fisc, and malevolent political leadership that is by no means above exploiting racial sentiment in order to hold on to power. His allies have been running U.S. cities for a generation, and it takes a considerable measure of brass for him to come in decrying the results as though he had no hand in them.
Towns and cities are just wood, concrete and steel.
They don’t go bad on their own.
It’s the “Gibs-Me-Dats” that ruin perfectly good neighborhoods, towns and cities.
As long as society pretends that inanimate objects, not the scumbag demographic, are the cause of our problems nothing will ever change for the better.
Especially when we have the champion of them all sitting at the top of the government.
Excellent line, really sums it up.
almost all the rioters on the pics and videos are Obama supporters.
that is what is wrong
“We saw a dramatic turnabout in crime and public disorder in New York under Republican Rudy Giuliani”
And they hated him. they knew the City did well but they hated him. They hate to be told to not jaywalk for the sake of saving their lives (Guiliani) but they love to tell people to not smoke or consume soda (Bloomberg)
Mr. Williamson or anyone interested could instruct also why cities choose bad policy, democrat mayors. They live poorly, but they choose the leadership.
Also, as he talks about out of wedlock births, people now think, ‘more birth control’, but birth control as a social norm is actually the problem, and it has to do with its causative breakdown of the family, as well as an increase in births to unwilling parents, especially to unwilling males/fathers.
from the Brookings Institute:
“Since 1970, out-of-wedlock birth rates have soared. In 1965, 24 percent of black infants and 3.1 percent of white infants were born to single mothers. By 1990 the rates had risen to 64 percent for black infants, 18 percent for whites. Every year about one million more children are born into fatherless families.”
And from http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/marriage/mf0002.html:
“The birth rate of unmarried women has gone from 14.1 per thousand in 1950 to 43.8 per thousand in 1990: a 310% increase...”
If this article’s content was being discussed on all newscasts,cable channels and at water coolers and on the stump of political campaigns,the country MIGHT have a chance of revival.
Do I think that will happen,when the bears no longer do their business in the woods.
Although mentioned earlier in the story, here he misses a fifth unhappy factor: ILLEGITIMACY. With 60% illegitimacy in St. Louis and 70% among blacks nationwide, the adolescents in these communities fail to learn the lesson of sexual self-control and the value of delayed satisfaction. This lack of maturity in the sexual realm translates to other areas of their character, ensuring that as adults they remain perpetual adolescents, a guarantee that they will fall into poverty. It also robs the children of the strong masculine presence of their father, an important influence in the development of children.
This has occurred because of the liberal denial of sexual morality and the government assistance programs that take away the consequences of illegitimacy. In all of this the black churches have turned a blind eye. Yes, these cities need lower taxes and a better business environment, but they also need a return to traditional sexual morality and an elimination of government subsidies that support illegitimacy and hamper the formation of families.
Progressive cities are good places in which to study the obnoxious effects of psychosis.
IMHO
Hellholes... that's what they have in common.
He missed the fact that once American Blacks become a certain percentage of the population their children immediately set about the task of ethnically cleansing the taxpayer funded education system. Whites, Asians, and Black Folks that are “too white” are then forced to leave for the protection of their children.
Mr. Williamson is one of the few writers left at NR who doesn’t have is head permanently wedged between his butt cheeks.
I can’t comment. the writer has said all that needs to be said, except what to do about it, and I don’t know either.
Whatever one thinks of Ayn Rand, she saw this - the government perceives problems, real or imagined, and acts to solve them and creates worse problems, which they claim to be able solve, and then create even worse problems, in acting to solve the problems they created with their previous “solutions”, until it all falls down.
Until that class realizes they are being used for political tools, take responsibility for their OWN actions and stop blaming whitey just because they don't get everything they want when they want it....NOTHING will change.
. . . which raises the natural question as to whether/to what extent playing classical music in prisons would affect the recidivism rate.We know that businessmen have learned to play classical music in places where they wish bored youth would not congregate, and that tends to separate the wheat from the chaff since people more likely to spend money are more likely to tarry - and teens, much less so.
Bell curve, something else repudiated by the people of MO. They should have voted for Akin.
Cleveland is different though for it is hosting Jebbie’s coronation in 2016.
Most Americans still think that the problems we have are the result of too little liberalism. They cannot discern.
Every one of them?
“For years, our major cities were undermined by a confluence of four unhappy factors: 1. higher taxes; 2. defective schools; 3. crime; 4. declining economic opportunity.”
#1 should be a complete lack of morals, glorifying illegitimate birth and abortion is a glaring example.
Windsor, ON and Vancouver, BC have been run by socialists for that long.
Perhaps it's something else about Detroit, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago, Atlanta, Newark, Memphis, and all the other examples?
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